


What is Home Without These Streets I Know

by Randy_sensei



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Death, F/F, Gen, Monsters, Post-Apocalypse, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-02-06 15:51:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12820872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randy_sensei/pseuds/Randy_sensei
Summary: Max is set to leave Arcadia Bay on the count of moving to Seattle.Chloe is set to mourn on the count of her father dying, and her best friend leaving.No one counts for the bombs to drop when they did and no one counted for them to do what they did. Now, everything is frozen over and life has almost stopped.Almost. There's still beating hearts left.





	1. CHAPTER ZERO: THE BREATHLESS WIND

**Author's Note:**

> Uh, hey, hi.
> 
> So, this is my first fan-fiction. Or rather the first one I've decided to post publicly.
> 
> Anything you see is subject to change. I'll post more since soon. Its also posted on FFN.
> 
> Enjoy, if possible.

_Late September, I think. I know it's twenty-twelve, still._

 

The words rang in the figure's mind, as it approached an abandoned gas station at the foot of a hill covered in snow.

Confident strides, the rifle held in both hands swayed left to right, as if a pendulum. With shoddy white netting wrapped around the barrel, the brown and worn body of the rifle was standing out, especially up against the slick white coat front of its wielder.

The wielder, face concealed behind a pair of ski goggles, had a scarf up to their nose, thick beanie atop their head with hair tucked away, a pair of cargo pants and a long coat; to say they were prepared for the weather would be an understatement.

As of late, the nearby area, and just about the rest of the world, had been in what you could theoretically call a nuclear winter. For you see, it wasn't just the great US of A in this predicament. Due to the nuclear war that suddenly erupted out in the middle of Europe, everyone was doomed to suffer the same fate as the ones who started all of this. One of the mentioned bombs landed on the East Coast of the US, to the luck of many on the West Coast.

What lays after a certain point is unknown, due to radiation taking its toll on the other side. The size of the bomb, however was very much debatable, due to how far it spread.

It was quite the saddening thought.

It wasn't long before the figure approached the door of the station, in a careful stance, only to regain its posture after making sure all was clear from where they were standing. A glance at the door revealed a rusty padlock, its almost rusted off red paint staring back. A few strikes with the butt of the rifle at the padlock as it was frozen in time was all it took to void it of its use.

A few steps in, the figure shakes off all the snow atop their shoulders.

 _Could have gone through the window but_ , the figure shrugs to itself, _needless noise._

In a few swift movements, the rifle was slung onto their shoulder and a knife showed its face from its holster on the inside of the coat. Center of gravity lowered, the figure sifted through the station, looking for anyone and anything, knife still ready to spring in their palm.

At this point in time, scavenging was not a rare sight. Then again, neither was murder.

To no surprise, the station yielded very little, a barely not-expired candy bar and some duct tape. The lofty messenger bag sat situated at the figures side was, with a few swift movements, used to store the two items and the station stood empty soon after. At the end of a wall of the gas station, the figure looks out, leaning on it slightly.

Winter sure has taken its toll. But it looks much more peaceful than when people frequented the area. The road in front of the gas station was completely snowed over, showing only a very faint trail of tracks leading up, past the hill. The gas station itself was in a clearing right before the aforementioned hill, only for the trees to later envelope the road as it goes up and over.

The figure regains balance and stands in a brooding fashion when it spots a wolf. A light grey, barely sticking out from the snow behind it, only its piercing eyes to aid in spotting it, it looked towards the station, standing there, observing what had become its territory, only to turn back and walk away from the treeline.

WIth a sigh of relief and a head on a swivel, the figure set out soon after the wolf had departed. Doesn't make sense sticking around after that.

The snow makes it dreadfully hard to keep your tracks covered, but luckily, the steady snowfall helps. A moment or two later, the figure now stood at the top of the hill.

To the left, a sign. Seems like the better part of it has been cut or taken out by something, the rest obscured.

"..ME TO"

"..A BAY", whats left of the sign read.

The figure didn't seem to need it, as the confident strides kept at their pace towards the town, the steps seemingly faster than before.

* * *

 

The embers of a fire ebbed in the air, like flies around a rotting carcass.

 

The crackling of the fire was all you could hear through out the night, as a group of two sat around a campfire situated in an abandoned apartment complex that was still under construction. The two sat on small seats made of loose brick. Around them, a few bags were situated. Camping out in an unfinished building didn't sound like a good idea, but it had sufficed for now.

The two of them were tattered and restless, while one seemed nervous, glancing behind his shoulder every so often, towards the main stairs leading up and down each floor.

The other spoke up in a mild tone; "Josh, calm the hell down, you're making me nervous by being nervous. Nothing's gonna happen, were safe for now."

The ma- ahem, Josh looked around once more, his gaze occasionally glancing at his travelling companion, before replying: "You d-don't know that for sure.. You can never know. I-I don't wanna die tonight, okay?"

He looked around again, clutching at his shoulders, his right knee bobbing up and down frantically.

"Look, all I'm saying is you need to tone it down a little, okay?" the other replied while placing an opened can of beans on the makeshift grill on top of the fire.

After a while, Josh speaks up. "I-I'm gonna get up a bit."

The more feeble framed of the two starts getting up. His companion shrugs. A few steps away, the man, seemingly in his early 20's takes a cigarette out of the battered container he procured from his pockets, along with a lighter.

Once, twice, he tries to spark the lighter. Nothing. A third time, still nothing. He throws the lighter off the edge, tapping his foot. After a thought or two with his hand up to his chin, he heads back to his companion, slumping his shoulders as he treads towards him.

"Hey." he starts to call out. "D-Do you have your lighter sti-" is all he could mouth as an arrow finds its way into the neck of the man seated at the fire.

Eyes as wide as the moon, he takes a step back, only for the heel of someones foot to connect with the back of his left knee, forcing him downwards. A hand had caught his shoulder when this all started, so he falls to his knees rather than on his stomach.

Before much retaliation could be allowed, a knife caused his breathing to hitch, only for the breath to be replaced with blood. With disbelief, he reaches for his neck, only to come back with blood on his finger tips. He didn't last long after.

Situated above him, a tall boy with blonde hair stood, cleaning the knife he used mere seconds ago. Another shadow approached from nearby, a girl, blonde haired and careful in her steps, almost mimicking a fox in its prowl, she held a bow, with two fingers set at the tip of the holster on her side.

Soon after, she slung the bow onto herself and continued at a normal pace. The man turned around and gestured towards the fire with his head. "Good shot." he started "You're getting better and better."

A smile formed under his face cover, making it rise with his cheekbones. The girl waves it away, "Nothing special."

She stands roughly in between the two bodies as she glances at their handy work.

"Tsk. Poor bastards, didn't stand a chance." The boy shrugs, "Couldn't have made it more obvious if they tried." He mulled his words over "If you ask me, they either wanted to die, or they were stupid beyond words."

"Or they were just scared, not thinking straight." the woman points to her temple with a slightly raised eyebrow.

"Well, the one with an arrow through his throat," he absently pointed, "was confident," he points to his feet, "This guy, on the other hand wasn't very. They both ended the same way," he finishes with a shrug.

With the finishing of that sentence, he walked over to their bags. Lifting one of the bags to inspect, he finds pretty much what you'd expect; some clothes, some food, a hunting knife and a weathered picture of one of the two with a woman at what seemed like an amusement park, hugging each other with one hand and prizes or food in the other.

A shake of the head and a sigh is all it took for the picture to depart the boy's hand and land in the fire.

The girl stood watch, her eyes on high alert as her accomplice sifted through the recently deceased parties' belongings. Anything useful stuffed in a duffel, the boy puts out the fire before heading towards the main stairs, tapping his partners shoulder as he went past. 

She followed soon after. They both raise their hoods in unison as their feet land in the soft evening snow, as they fell from the small drop. The area around them wasn't any less in reckless abandon than the complex they were just in, it seemed like a worse part of whatever, or wherever they found themselves. 

Shrouded in pitch black, the moon and the stars provided what little illumination there was to be had. They had started treading in a certain direction, but it was hard to make anything out in the moon light. 

Their eyes are yet to adjust. 

* * *

 

The white feature-obscured figure from before had made its way further towards the town it was approaching.

Before passing a wrecked RV with a drab off-white paint job, it stopped in its tracks, looking over what was left of the vehicle. Passing it after taking in the sight, it stuck its hand out, tracing across the wide side of it, head bowed down.

Moving further into the town, whilst passing a junkyard, the figure looked away.

"American Rust", a sign with letters that barely clung to their backdrop read.

Stopping at the sight of footprints in the road, the bundle of coats froze for a bit, only to walk over to the prints and lower to one knee with the purpose of inspecting the steps in the snow: a hand floated above them, a few fingers left to dangle above.

Fresh. About a few hours, give or take. Two pairs of the steps, one of which was longer and slightly wider footed, followed somewhat close by another one, probably belonging to a smaller frame.

Looking forward to where the tracks lead, the individual winces lightly. Kneeling still, it takes a bit to mull over whether following them is really worth it. Deciding to head there anyways, with plenty of hesitation, the masked mystery stood up again and started walking, following the tracks somewhat closely.

A few minutes of walking further, it had seemed like the other part of town is where the prints led.

The scene beheld was one of struggle; as if someone was attacked in the middle of the night, or just outright attacked in hand-to-hand. Struggling and tossing around etched in the snow, the struggle was followed closely by blood.

The body of a man, older, in his 40's, maybe, stood motionless and nearly frozen through and through, with a bullet hole in his forehead. The point-forty-four sized hole saw all the way through his skull.

Another path of blood revealed a body in what seemed like a crashed-through store front of a coffee shop. Its back against the customer facing part of the counter, the other body held its hand across its stomach, clutching at the left arm.

Kneeling at the body revealed the right hand to be hiding a bloodied bite mark, seemingly human.

_What the fuck?_

The weary soul recoiled in fear, raising its hands to chest level, only to calm down with a few deep breaths and a look around, after which further inspection continued.

His head contained another bullet hole, similar in caliber like the one before. The culprit sat idly next to the victim, dropped there by someone else. It wasn't suicide, obviously, but all things considered, does it matter much?

The eyes of the body were still open. The newfound investigator took the head with both hands, slowly lifting it up to eye level, only to find the eyes bloodshot, nearly completely devoid of any color past the red of blood.

Head soon left alone, the only witness to the crime was the .44 revolver sat on the shop floor. Picking it up, in one nudge at the cylinder, the figure counted its ammo. _Old class revolver, maybe '89, three rounds in the cylinder._

A flick of the revolver caused the cylinder to fly shut, only for it to be stowed into the mess of winter clothes.

Steps back towards the original body were caused by the previous realization, the same one cast a spell on the mountain of clothes; center of gravity was once again low, steps are careful and head on high alert, obviously scared of whatever that discovery was.

A further inspection revealed similar symptoms, only this one was found with blood and skin alien to the host body in the mouth.

With a shake of the head, the winter detective decided to explore more. As it turns out, a school bus found its way into the forefront of the store. The front was covered in rubble and debris, all the behind-the-counter contents spilled forward, presumably in the impact.

The backdoor of the bus was open, perhaps forcefully. A few steps in, and a small gasp could be heard.

It was cleverly made into a makeshift shelter, with the front door leading into a back room behind the counter of the shop. As that was the only entrance to that room, it was easy to secure and protect. Besides the great job done for shelter, it was obviously inhabited by someone.. young. Drawings of a pair of people, a house with a family, some dogs or cats, amongst other things, were strewn about a dark corner in the even darker room.

Two sleeping bags sat close in one part of the room, opposite to the drawing corner. A stash of sorts, albeit small, was ransacked nonetheless, only a small duffel sticking out from behind one of the untouched boxes close to the stash. Managing to pull out the duffel, the scavenger went through its contents, only to find a flashlight, some letters, more pictures, some matches, two bottles of water and a screwdriver, bloodied tip and all.

Noticing it was dark enough for the flashlight to prove useful, the scavenger flicked it on. Nothing that could not be deduced before, except for an integral part of the backdrop.

The corpse of a small, brown haired girl hunched in the corner made the shape wince at the sight, averting the flashlight slowly, only to bring it back. The vagabond stood, frozen in fear.

A slow walk, approaching the figure made her nearly double over. A tug at corpse's shoulder made the frozen sculpture tug her hands back, only to return the body to its original position again, kneeling close and staying silent while kneeling for a moment, head bowed down, similar to a prayer.

A few steps and out the door the masked investigator came, squinting high at the sky to check the time, only to be startled and interrupted by the distant reverb of a gunshot, followed closely after by a murder of ravens flying off.

Ducking instantly and getting to the nearest wall or cover, the clothed shape looked around, only to establish that the gun shot was far away, clutching the rifle harder than during the investigation. The decision to inspect might not be smart, yet somehow it was compelling. 

 

* * *

 

The pair walked in bounding formation with their head on a swivel, only to return to normal once they were far enough away from the site of their little assault deep in the city.

They found themselves on a highway, followed by the coast somewhat closely.

"Who do you think that was in the picture?" the girl procured carefully.

A shrug was followed up by "Seemed like a girlfriend, why?"

"Don't know.. Lately I've been getting these thoughts after we'd kill someone and find personal shit like that."

"Its not often that it happens, for all its worth, so at least you don't have to have those thoughts constantly," he looked at her as they walked, only to continue, "These days, the past doesn't matter all that much. All you need to survive is the present."

A sad look befalls her face as she stares downwards, not meeting his eyes. The walk continues in silence. The boy seemed to start getting increasingly uneasy as they passed through the streets.

"Do you feel like... Something's watching us?" he said in a tone just above a whisper.

The girl looked around, slowly, with a concerned look.

"Doesn't seem to be anything out there that I can see," she said whilst still keeping on high alert.

A few slowed steps and some time of looking around, they decide it was nothing, only to continue the usual pace.

"Seattle, right? That's where we're headed, last I checked," the boy spoke up.

A nod was followed closely by "We have a job to do over there, maybe we can get some pickings along the way." The sentence was enveloped in a sullen tone.

A sudden stop in steps, the girl dragged the boy back by the shoulder, immediately pulling him to duck down with her. The boy shot a confused and questioning glance at his partner, only to see the distressed look in her face. A quick look forwards revealed a group of people, shambling, looking nowhere in particular, and directly behind them, an armed group.

They mowed each shambling figure down one by one.

The girl gasped and clutched at her mouth, as her companion stood there, his gaze unbelieving. They quickly hid away in a moat on the side of the road, only to look at each other in confusion.

The boy's gaze now adamant, he signaled for his partner to stay silent, after which he took her wrist and led her down the moat towards the shooting, occasionally keeping eyes on the group of people. They got somewhat closer before they took another look. A group of five, they all wore similar things, varying only in color; ski pants, military rigs over snow parkas, with the hood up and gas-masks. Some shades were different, some just different colors.

None of them were, luckily, hard to miss. His grip released as he signaled towards himself, looking back to get a confirmation. A nod is all it takes for the two to start heading upwards, towards a hill and trees, seemingly hoping to avoid them completely.

Now in the trees, they look down to see the group from before patrol down the highway. The sigh of relief was almost perfectly unanimous. They fail to notice the lack of one in the group as it kept strolling past.

Soon, they come to notice that mistake of theirs with the whizzing sound of a 7.62 fly into the tree near the head of the boy, putting him in a slight daze, his ears ringing, as both of them run for cover.

One of the figures from before, on the highway, had made his way up to them and came hunting. After ducking from more shots, the daze was shaken off and a glance was exchanged, followed by a nod.

The smaller of the two sprinted between covers, eliciting a shot from the masked person in her general direction. The male sprung out of cover, inching closer and closer to the shooter with each tree.

With his attention away from him, the boy crept closer with every one. Both of them were hiding by the time the armed man looked around for the other of the two.

"Quit hiding, you scrawny cunts!" his voice was rough and accented; probably South-American. The short haired of the two couldn't help but grit his teeth, as the impact of his shoulder to the assailants back was more than enough to stumble him.

He angled his fist and landed a punch to the back of his head, causing his weapon to drop. As he was kept pinned, the girl arose from cover and shoved the 6 inch blade procured from a fore-arm holster into the assaulter's stomach once, after which he was released from the pin against the tree.

He stumbled backwards, grasping at the stab wound.

"You little bi-" was all he could mouth feebly, before the inside of his throat felt the cold wind and saw the night sky.

His shoulders slumped and he fell to his knees, drowning in his own blood.

"Lets grab anything off him and leave fast," the girl said, dusting her hands and re-holstering the knife

"Don't have to tell me twice." he said as he lunged down to pick the body clean of anything of use. 

* * *

 

Approaching the area from where the sound of the shot ebbed as it lead further into the forest, a shallow and faint stack of smoke could be seen.

A fire was snuffed out here, a while ago. The campfire was slightly offcentre in this circled clearing that was completely surrounded by trees, a bit close to two tents, one of which looked trampled.

Seemed like a camp that was abandoned in a hurry. It was hard to see any signs of life. Our masked protagonist carefully walked along the edges of the cover of trees, actively looking to spot anything, anything to show an all clear.

It was a while before taking the steps inward was deemed safe enough. The clearing appeared flat, which was not the case. The outsides were banked downwards towards the center, which caused the mound of clothes to almost slip, only to regain balance soon after.

Exploring the camp yielded something, but not much of use.

A book, 'October Country' by Ray Bradbury, some hair ties, a crumpled post-it note, pertaining to nothing in particular, seemed like a date and/or time, some energy bar wrappers and a broken string of something, possibly a guitar. Leaving the contents alone in a similar state as they were found, the lingering feeling of being watched was present.

The investigative character tensed up lightly at the feeling, only to notice something in the corner of its eye. A wolf stood somewhat far off, the same one as before, idly and vacantly starting towards, and quite possibly through.

Tearing its sight in the opposite direction of the wolf to more pressing matters, a rustling sound of leaves being cleared in a path could be heard. Ducking behind the tent quickly, the body sought better cover, only to find it in the arising trees. Ducking low and taking a knee, steadying its breath, the figure cocked its ears, ready to hear exactly who they were intruding on.

Light steps, were followed by a huff and a drop of what sounded like a bag. The steps continued shortly, only for them to tense up and stop.

The prints. Whoever is in the camp must have saw the prints. Getting ready for a fight was cut short by the swinging noise of a large branch that our protagonist managed to swiftly dodge.

A knife was procured from the inside of their coat and was swung at the branch-wielding shadow. A dodge backwards, both of the compositions faced each other as if in a standoff.

The mountain of clothes found itself facing a woman, shorter by a head, approximately, with a hood up and a scarf over the nose, leaving the tense and angry blue eyes out for the world to see.

A grey hoodie with a black vest with its sleeves raised to the elbow and dark, denim jeans, followed by a pair of boots.

"What do you want from me," the blue eyed assailant exclaimed in a distressed tone. Her opponent recoiled slightly, only to start replying, before having to clear its throat.

"Nothing, I thought this camp was abandoned," it retorted, holding a knife close for defense.

"Well it isn't! Now what, you kill me?"

"No, absolutel-" was all the white-clad image said in a hardly distinguishable female voice before she was charged at with the aforementioned branch.

The forearms of one were met with the forearms of another, placed in a cross formation with the purpose to block. A broken off and sharp edge of a large branch merely inches from her face, the white wearing female kicked her opponent in the base of the stomach, sending her towards the tree, landing back first in a slight daze, dropping the weapon.

The fight wasn't long. The blue-eyed of the two was not very strong. She started grasping at the hand at her neck as the one who pinned her there started breathing louder than before.

"Well? Finish what you started," she snarled, the clawing at the hand kept on.

The interloper froze up for a second, seemingly in realization, only to chuckle to itself, before looking back up and continuing its laughter, now harder than before.

"No, I don't- I don't think I could." it said with an audible grin.

This only made the pinned girl angrier. "Why?! That's what you're here for anyways!" she exclaimed, continuing her petty assault.

"Again... Don't think I could."

"Why?" the hands stopped and only held on, yet the gaze kept at its intensity and remained unfaltered.

"Got some.. sick and fucked up plan for me?" she shook her head to one side with a questioning tone and an equally questioning tone of voice and glance, "Gonna lock me up somewhere? Sell me to some slavers or something?"

The laughter continued even during the sentence.

"No no no, nothing like that." The voice at the other end became more defined, as the blue eyes blinked twice, thrice only for the pupils to dilate in realization.

The character backed away releasing the smaller girl from the tree, only to start loosening the scarf that surrounded her face.

"Its been long; I have to say, not surprised you didn't recognize me." as she kept at the scarf, eventually managing to take it off, revealing a pale lower face, a smirk and white teeth behind it.

"I'm just surprised I found you here of all places." The blue eyes stared on in disbelief, the mask lightly misshapen from the mouth open behind it in disbelief.

After the scarf, the goggles came off soon after, revealing a pair of light blue eyes, starting to stare intently at the opposite pair.

"Its nice to see you too, Maxi-pad." the smirk only grew larger. "What, don't recognize me?" she said, spreading both hands away from her core with the goggles and scarf in each, leaving the beanie on her head, with her weight shifted onto one her legs, striking a pose.

The other pair of eyes only grew wider in shock. A few more blinks and the girl lunged in the arms of the other girl.

"Chloe, holy shit!" she exclaimed gleefully, her arms wrapping around the neck of her recently rediscovered friend and her nose finding her way to the crook of it, smiling from ear to ear.

Chloe was thrown off balance, sticking a foot behind her to maintain what little of it was left, reciprocating the longing hug, indulging in the warmth.

"Nice to see you too, dork."


	2. CHAPTER ONE: STEEL TRYING TO BECOME WOOD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max and Chloe find each other by dumb luck; our duo of original characters sets out after a night's rest. 
> 
> The second chapter of my first work of fan-fiction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hey!
> 
> So, I crosspost on FFN. There, in the first chapter, I said: 'If literally anyone wants more, I'll post more.'
> 
> People somehow wanted more, therefore they're going to get what they want.
> 
> Also, chapters for this fic are now going to be posted on the last day of every month, and I'll try to keep it that way. 
> 
> I can't promise anything next month, though, what with it being December and all.
> 
> I'd also like to say thanks to my first and only, so far, beta reader, VengeSim!
> 
>  
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Standing in the rain as the wind howled, the boy held a cloth-wrapped object in his hand, his personal memento mori.

It served to shock him back into the harsh reality that is life, to cement the knowledge that no one is ever truly safe.

Back to the harsh reality that no one really lives happily ever after.

Even if it was already a reality he experienced many-a-time before.

He looked down slowly, his palm turning over the object as it stared up at him.

There was an empty look in his eyes, as if all he could do was think.

A reality you experience before never makes you any more prepared for whatever happens; all you know of it is that it just...does.

Before he knew it, the whistling sound of the wind was replaced by silence. His eyes were shut.

 

And before he knew it, his fate had struck him, quite literally.

* * *

Drenched in sweat, in a flurry of gasps, the boy shot up, waking from a daze of the night horror that held him hostage for far too long.

 

Looking around, he made out his surroundings, only to relax. She was there with him, on the opposite side of the dimly lit lantern, sleeping away, or so it seemed.

"Wh-," she started, rubbing her eyes as she propped herself up onto her elbows, "What's up? Is everything alright?" She asked as she stared at her companion intently.

A slow nod turned into a faster, slightly more reassuring one. "Yeah... It- Its nothing..."

Shifting to sit up, she kept her eyes on him. "Doesn't look like it to me," she said as she tilted her head at him, rubbing one of her eyes.

"Trust me, I'm fine," he said as the base of his palm met the back of his neck.

Still looking at him, the girl shifted back into a sleeping position, before sighing deeply and turning over to sleep.

The boy got up soon after, slowly, not wanting to wake up his companion.

After finally making it to a town fairly south of Portland, finding a tall building was relatively easy. Finding an apartment in one of them that was abandoned, had a distinct lack of corpses and didn't have enough locks for a prison was not as easy. But somehow they managed.

Staring out of the balcony window, the skyline was somewhat obscured by lower buildings, nearly surrounding the bigger one they found themselves in for the night. There was not a single light to be found in the city.

The night sky, on the other hand, grew prettier and prettier by the day. Seems like the lack of active humanity is good for...well, just about everything else.

Living in another person's home is less than ideal, but it's comfier than whatever other idea they could scrape up.

Supporting himself against the frame of the window with his elbow, the boy wore basic clothing for sleep; grey shirt and running pants with socks the same shade as the rest.

Scratching the back of his neck, deep in thought, his attention was suddenly turned away from the small, snow-covered balcony in front of him onto the nearby rooftop, where a silhouette caught his eye.

It was human, that part was obvious, but anything past that was left to assumption due to the obvious lack of light. He was surprised he even made the silhouette out in the first place.

The silhouette turned, looking almost directly at him. The boy felt his heart skip a beat, only to take some comfort from the fact that he was completely enveloped in darkness himself. He straightened out, no longer leaning on to the window frame.

His eyes stared intently back at the whatever-in-the-dark. It stared back for what felt like an eternity.

As if willing to break the awkward stare, the figure looked back forwards, as it slowly fell into the open space in front of it and out of sight from the boy that stared back mere moments ago.

Silence enveloped the situation as the tension that was there before had been replaced with dread.

The boy stood there a moment, watching the where the figure had been, numb from bone to bone. Almost as if it didn't touch him. Almost.

After a moment of just standing there in disbelief, the boy walked- no, shambled would be more fitting, back to his sleeping bag, placed on top of the couch.

Staring at the ceiling, he was pretty damn sure the ceiling was staring back after a while.

 

He barely fell asleep.

* * *

 "So-" she was instantly cut off.

 

"Just.. Let me have this, Chloe, please." Max said in a tone slightly above a whisper as she kept the embrace going, her hands clutching Chloe close to her.

Chloe suddenly felt how needy Max had sounded at the moment, making her worry. She decided against breaking away from the hug, instead starting to rub Max's back with her one loose hand, as if it was going to help in any way.

After a little bit, Max pulled away, letting go a few sniffles, her face still covered. Her eyes dug into Chloe, barely believing she's really here.

Chloe realizes she missed this and missed Max too much, so she decided to stare back, as if in an active attempt to make this more awkward.

Luckily for her, Max decided to break the awkwardness with a punch to Chloe's shoulder.

"Ow! What was that for?" Chloe winces and asks, despite the fact she was perfectly aware why.

"Oh, I don't know. Snooping around in my camp, maybe," Max huffed, "You had me worried sick, I thought you were some asshole out for blood," she scratched at her head through her hood, irritated.

"That would explain the bloodthirsty charge with.. A branch, of all things? Seriously," Chloe inquired with a scoff and a smirk.

Max crossed her arms and shifted her weight to one foot, "Oh, I'm sorry, Little Miss Hardened Survivor. Not everyone has a weapon," She gestures to the rifle with a nudge of her chin as she crosses her arms.

Chloe waved it off. "You can't be serious when you tell me you don't have a weapon close by; that's not being a hardened survivor, that's being an 'I-want-to-live-for-longer-than-a-day' survivor."

Max shrugged, "Don't know, managed so far without one."

"Which is a miracle in on itself," one Chloe was very much happy for.

Exhaling hard, Max retorted "Well, Chloe, you're still yourself, especially with everything going on," she raised her head as she puts down the face cover with a smile on her face, "I've missed you. Really."

Her smile was genuine, her face still littered with the ever familiar freckles of that one thirteen-year-old four years ago, but the one thing that caught Chloe's attention was the scar across the mouth.

She gawked with a sigh for a second before reacting. "Whoa! Nice battle-scar, Maxaroni," she exclaimed, maybe all too excited, but to be fair, it did look pretty cool.

Blushing slightly, she touched the scar with her fingertips, "Oh, this? Nothing special," she waves it off.

"Are you crazy? Little Max with a scar, how badass is that? I wonder what your parents thought, I'd say it looks pretty good," she procured with a nudge of her shoulder.

At the mention of parents, the twinkle in Max's eyes retracted a little into itself as she swallowed hard. Her gaze wandered to the ground.

Chloe noticed she might've struck a nerve, only making her grow even more worried than before.

"Max, everything alright?" she asked carefully with a tinge of worry.

"I- I'm fine, Che. Lets.." she shook her head, her breath hitching as she cleared her throat, as she gestured towards the town that could be seen through the trees.

They walk in silence for a bit, before Chloe decides to break it.

"So Max... Where we headed," she procured the question carefully.

"Back into town. I made a more permanent camp in one of the houses," Max started whilst walking along side Chloe, leading her into the town, "We can talk properly there."

Max stopped at the edge of the forest, where grass met asphalt as it extends into a road. Crouching down to one knee, she started looking cautiously around her and then up and down the street. Deducing it was safe, she started walking out into the street and then gestured to Chloe as they both cross.

They walk through a few neighborhoods of the Bay that Chloe manages to recognize. She knew  _of_  the places but never bothered to visit or be there; she had no reason to, back when life was normal.

The walk to her shelter was spent in silence as Chloe watched Max in her own world, judging precisely how much she changed as she weaved past barriers and obstacles in her way, like a cat in the snow.

When they found themselves in a small alley way between houses, her staring was cut short as Max abruptly stopped in her tracks. Her hand out to Chloe, she stopped her from bumping into her too hard.

Snapping back to reality, she looked at her guide curiously and then in front of them, only to notice something decayed in the form of an animal, shambling aimlessly.

It looked on with ghastly dark yellow eyes, with the occasional cyst, growth or blemish decorating its sickly grey fur, its tail had almost fallen off and one of its ears had a bite through it.

Chloe's throat dried out slowly.

"I heard the stories, but I couldn't believe them... It sounded crazy," Chloe said in a whisper, hoping not to draw the attention of what was once called an animal.

They sat there for a few minutes even after  _it_  had passed, expecting something to shamble in front of them at the very moment they decided to emerge. Neither of them dared to move.

Max's mask and chest raised in unison as she sighed with a shut of her eyes. She started walking forwards, slowly, making as little noise as possible in the tall, afternoon snow.

Heel-first, lowering the rest of her foot slowly in each step as the snow crunched under her, she sneaked to the corner of the alley, close to where they had noticed the walking corpse, and to their luck, all seemed clear.

Chloe felt her lungs expand again as the suspense from before evaporated slowly.

The look on Chloe's face, the wide-eyed one, the one of spotting a  _mutant, or whatever those damned things were anymore,_ refused to wipe itself as they continued walking. She could have sworn people said that animals weren't in danger.  _Looks like that's changed for the worst._

Max looked back only to be startled at the sight of the wide eyes behind her.

"Chloe, you alright?" Max asked, turning slightly and slowing her pace.

"I think so. I just haven't seen one of those in person before," she replied whilst scratching her scalp through her beanie.

Max gripped onto Chloe's arm, holding it reassuringly. She let go almost as quickly, with a single nod, before turning and continuing, but not before Chloe gave her a glance of her own, nodding.

They walk for the better part of the next few minutes before Chloe spoke up again, noticing something distinct.

"Hey, wasn't this my old neighborhood," she asked, "since I think my house is behind that one there," she said as she pointed in a general direction.

Max hums an affirmative answer, "Your house is a few houses past that one, we can go there later, if you'd like," Max said as she stopped and turned to Chloe to reply.

"Why not go now? We're pretty close as is," Chloe asked.

Max retorts with a shrug, followed by "I wanted to talk to my best friend somewhere comfy and less outside for the first time, in like ever. Please?"

Chloe, while hoping to stare away from the puppy eyes Max dished out with the last part of her sentence, groaned and continued following Max.

Cautiously walking for a few more minutes, they approach the back of a house, one of a faded orange color.

"So, is this where you live now?" Chloe asked, looking the two-story over with her hands on her hips after jumping a fence to get to the back yard.

Max replies affirmatively and nods as Chloe attempted to make something out through the boarded and stained glass. She approached the glass door that leads to the backyard they were in from the inside of the house and pressed her hands lightly to the glass, attempting to block the light from reflecting from the window.

Managing to spot nothing inside, Chloe inquired Max further, "Max, are you  _sure_  you live here? It looks abandoned."

Max chuckles nasally, "That's precisely the point," she said as she walked towards the side of the house facing the fence between them and the neighbouring house.

Chloe looked at Max, looked at where she's headed with a confused expression.

With the same expression drawn on her face, she inched to the corner Max had gone around a moment ago, only to spot her crouching on a pile of rubble, hand on the window next to her leading into the house.

"Max," Chloe asked, confused, "What are you doing?"

Max smiled, evident by her mask raising, "What's it look like? Come on in," she said, gesturing to the window with her head as she stepped inside.

Managing to somehow step into the house, Max ruffled the bushes behind them as she stuck out of the window as Chloe dusted herself and looked around the room they found themselves in.

A look around revealed that all the windows and doors to the outside were reinforced and blockaded, with a few oil lanterns strewn about. The occasional box could be found but most, at first glance, seemed filled with junk or just empty. There was sheet-covered shape or two to be found, no doubt some furniture in need of protection.

Chloe turns to Max, " _This_ is how you live," she said, gesticulating around her with her hands.

"Duh, no silly. Follow me," Max said, pulling Chloe along with her towards the front door.

The front door, like nearly every other, was just as barricaded and reinforced, if not more. Drawing more confusion from Chloe, she started, "Damn, Max, you got this place on lockdown, huh?"

Max nods, "Uh-huh. Home-shit-home, as they say," she said whilst slowly heading up the steps to the second floor, opposite to the front door.

Chloe scoffs, "Sounds like something I would say."

As Max let go, she stood in front of the worn door, hands raised in a show-off manner.

"Ta-da," she exclaimed flatly.

"Well, this  _is_ a cozy stairwell, but I don't see why you'd sleep here," Chloe said with a grin plastered on her face as she gestured around in the air with a finger.

Scoffing, Max turned to the door to unlock it after rummaging through her bag.

Two satisfying lock noises later, they found themselves inside. Max locked the door behind them.

 

They were in a hallway, two entrances on either side of them and another two down where the hallway extended. To the right of them, a door with more locks met them. Cables could be seen leading out from it, with an idle buzz and whirr seeping under the door. At the end of the hallway, both of the rooms were closed and between them a window sat on the wall, reinforced and covered as much as the others.

Taking down her face cover, Max walked to the doorway of one the rooms and dropped her bag at the entry.

"Come on in," she gestured to Chloe slyly, "You must be tired, weary adventurer," she said as she moved further into the room with a slight giggle.

Chloe took off her hat, stuffing it in her pocket, smiling and walking into the room.

She took a moment to look,  _Lets see what little Max managed to make for herself,_ she thought as she leaned against the door frame.

Two mattresses formed a bed with pillows and blankets under a window, slightly less boarded and reinforced than the others, a bookshelf close to the bed, oddly devoid of dust and filled with books, a metal-framed storage chest, large enough to fit a Max into it and a dark grey worn armchair to fill the gap between the chest and the wall.

A set of dirty, off-white lantern lights hung from the ceiling in the room, close to hanging above the bed, plugged into an electrical extension cord that followed behind the bed and behind the bedside table, atop which sat a radio, among other things.

"Gotta say, you got a nice thing going… here," Chloe said as she looked around.

She stopped as she looked down at the rug situated under her; 'Keep Calm and Carry On'.

"Seriously," A jokingly disappointed expression befeld her as she looked at it.

Max replied as she sat on the bed, shrugging, "What, it's big and it was easy to find and carry."

Chloe shook her head, chuckling, "Once a hipster nerd, always a hipster nerd," she said, approaching the chair and falling into it with a  _thump_.

After a few moments of silence of Max laying down and Chloe sitting there, Chloe decides to speak up.

"So, Maxi-pad, don't just leave me in the silence, tell me what's up," she chimed up, somewhat loudly.

"Shush, you'll wake up half of the block," Max replied in a loud whisper turned laughter, checking the small uncovered hole in her window at the same time, "I'll tell you everything, you just had to ask, not yell it."

Chloe chuckled, "Sorry, sorry, I'm just excited to see you again,  _even after you went dark on me for nearly four years,"_ her voice going deadpan towards the end of the sentence.

"Okay, yeah, for the first year, maybe I'd understand your complaining," Max replied, now a little annoyed, "but I can't really reach out to you if there's nothing to reach out  _with._ "

With a deep exhale, she looked to Chloe, suddenly undertaking a sullen tone, "To say it's been tough is an understatement. I've pretty much been roughing it by myself, hell, I haven't spoken  _at all_  in so long," an awkward chuckle escapes Max's lips.

Chloe undertakes a bout of seriousness,  _for once_ , and listens to Max speak.

"Basically, the entire story goes," Max started and said with an exasperated sigh as she cleared her face and took her hood off. Chloe noticed Max's hair, it's length and color, raised an eyebrow at the sight, yet chose to stay silent.

"After I left the Bay, we lived in Seattle for about a year, or so. The riots and everything started and really took it's toll on the area nearby, so we decided to… Move back," Max's voice progressively more silent as the sentence continued.

"We were already gone by the time the Seattle riots started kicking off, we decided to get out of the Bay for the same reason, afraid they might spread here," Chloe shook her head, disbelieving, "I'm sorry, Max, I didn't know."

Max dismissed it with her hand, "It's fine, you couldn't have known," a clear of the throat and a sniffle later, Max continues, "We managed to make it to the exit out of the city but.. The rioters barely let us through, a-and.. Something landed.. In front of the car, making us lose control."

Chloe notices Max's hands tremble and decides to move over next to Max, hugging her.

"Hey, Max, it's fine, I'm here," she said as she comforted her, "You don't have to continue if you don't have to."

"I-It's fine," Max sobers up and straightens out, returning to how she was before she started, "Dad lost c-control after that and…"

"We crashed, Chloe. They both died," she exclaimed flatly and suddenly, staring into Chloe's eyes, "I woke up after, in an alley in Seattle, bandaged up and covered in a.. In a blanket, with a note and a backpack of all things. Like it was some stupid apology to… Make up with or… I don't know."

"No idea how, or why, but I took what I got and ran back home," Max exhaled heavily, "With nothing for me over there, I escaped to here after grabbing anything I could from our home."

Chloe swallowed before she spoke, "Max, I'm so sorry… I never knew," her grip on Max's shoulder tightening in reassurance.

"You couldn't have known. There was no way for you to know," Max said, procuring a single sob and quickly wiping her tear.

Chloe sighed heavily and they sat in the silence for a while before the crackling of the radio at the bedside table stored them both.

Max slowly looked up to it, Chloe's eyes pasted to it already as it crackles to life with static and a mess of barely comprehensible vocals.

"Another settlem-...-ed ou-...-onal for-..."

Comprehension getting harder by the second, Max stood up and adjusted the antennae of the radio, "-south east of Portland. So far, the entire settlement seems to have been wiped out. So far, we have a confirmation of fourteen killed."

"The encampment appears to have been ravaged by a variation of the mutated animals only seen deeper in the fog, until recently. The sighting of the mutant that was possibly the assailant, formed from a bear corpse, is one of three other mutants that have arisen in similar ways and that have wandered in from the fog," the man on the other side spoke in a slow and crestfallen voice.

Amongst the stiff silence, Chloe sat with her blood frozen.

 _That's what destroyed everything,_ she scoffs mentally in a sad tone,  _That would explain the claw marks, I guess..._

Chloe must have gone pale, because Max made a realization the moment their eyes connected again.

"That was the settlement you were in, wasn't it?"

Chloe nodded slow at first, swallowing, before her nodding sped up. Max moved her mouth as if to say something but failed, looking back to the radio and back to Chloe quickly.

With a sigh, the man continued, "In other news, the unknown mercenary group recently involved in the killing of innocents has been spotted along the I-5. Scavengers are warned to stay away from them; they are a dangerous, man-hunting group of individuals. Any pending wanted contracts on known criminals in the wasteland fo-"

Max turns off the radio in a quick jump and turned to Chloe before she could mouth what she intended.

"Max, wh-"

"Shh."

 

Chloe looked on in confusion as Max's eyes turn focused and aware, her hand slowly leaving Chloe's mouth. Max moved to a boarded up window, gently moving a piece, granting her sight.

The way Max's eyes shot wide after a moment of searching in almost-desperation turned Chloe's stomach upside down. She could only look in horror as Max was the only recipient of whatever view was on the other side.

Max moved away somewhat in a hurry, wearing the same stricken gaze on her eyes as the moment before. Chloe, hesitating in her movements, almost contemplating if seeing whatever it was was worth it, yet she eventually decided to look.

What she found at the other side was certainly worth Max's reaction. Her eyes fell to a sickly, grey humanoid figure, nearly six feet in height, with similar skin quality as the before-seen animal, located on a far-away street, dragging a body by the arm with one of its own... Many arms.. Or tentacles? Chloe wasn't sure.

A few moments passed and it stood in the middle of the street. With what almost could be described as joy, it tore into a body. It struck Chloe that the body it was tearing into was somewhat familiar and she placed it as the body she inspected some time ago.

The hairs on her back stood up as she felt almost sick but enraptured by the display of gore. Those same hairs stood as the pit in her stomach deepened the more she looked. At one point, the creature stopped its long and skinny appendages, stopping it's feast and held what was left of the body up in the air.

It moved its head slowly and Chloe didn't want to see where it looked. She darted from the hole and the pit deepened as her breath hurried and eyes darted frantically for Max, only to find her seated on the floor, leaned onto the bed, her head in her hands.

They both stood in complete silence, Chloe on the floor with her back to the wall and Max with her back against the bed. Max frantically blinked around as her eyes darted along the room, unsure of what she just saw. Her friend stared down at the floor, biting down on her hand in hopes of calming her breath.

Feeling like forever had past, Chloe slid the piece in the window where it stood before, her hands moving slowly and surely. With that done, she looked to Max in hope, only to be greeted by her piping up in a stage whisper.

"What was that thing," she asked in a throat-constricted tone.

"I have no idea. That was  _hella_  fucking terrifying," Chloe replied as she hugged her elbows close.

After a few tension-strung moments of silence, as if expecting something, Max was the first to relax. With a shaky exhale, she took her palm to her face and rubbed her eyes and forehead in tensed relaxation.

"See how nice this neighborhood is," she told Chloe, with a small smile drawing out slowly and barely, accompanied with a shake of her head.

Chloe donned a thousand mile stare up until the point of snapping back with Max's words, and with a shake of her own head, she blinked and looked to her, chuckling before retorting, "Great so far, neighbors seem friendly."

With a few exchanges with her best friend, Chloe felt more at home in a few moments than in a year or so at a camp with a bunch of people she never knew, or never cared to meet. With that thought, she somehow managed to push out whatever it was she had seen moments ago for a second, but not before it made it's own entrance again.

Chloe exhaled hard with her eyes shut and got up. Brushing off, she placed herself back in the chair adjacent, her brows furrowing and gaze slowly returning to normal, as normal as she could muster at the time, what with the storm of thoughts going on in her head.

Rising soon after, Max headed for the radio first, turning it on but adjusting the volume and laying back down. Before she could mouth anything, a  _thud_  could be heard from outside. Chloe and Max stiffened up, looking at each other.

Some peeking to the outside later, they deduced that whatever it was couldn't be seen from here and decide to take it upon themselves to investigate, much to the hesitancy of the both of them. No one  _wants_ to go outside after spotting what they did.

"Max, this is a terrible idea," Chloe stage-whispered to Max as they ducked around the house and back into an alleyway.

"Why are you out here then?"

Chloe opens her mouth to speak but stops. Not out of lack of thing to say, no, she had quite the retort to that. It's just… Kind of hard to speak or remember what you planned on saying earlier when you're staring at the same dead body you saw get lugged around by a horrifying mutant.

The same one that was now mangled and dropped in the street you just so happened to find yourself in.

 

The two of them stared from the alley, not daring to move.

* * *

The boy was stirred awake with the slow nascent of sunlight's rays across the room and onto his face. He woke with an exhale and a dazed look about him and slowly rose.

 

Clearing his eyes of the daze, he notices the empty sleeping bag. Glancing around the room, he checked to see if his companion had abandoned him. Seeing no signs of anything missing, he dressed and roamed.

The apartment itself came up empty; no dice. Something dawns on him when he changes course for the roof after putting on a jacket from the hanger in the apartment they were in.

A ping of relief dashed through his extremities when he spotted the familiar form on the roof. Standing at the doorway, he looked over at his partner-in-travel. After being given no piece of mind, he walked slowly to the edge of the roof, at which the girl sat, smoking.

A drag. Smoke escapes her lips. "Morning."

"Morning," the boy starts off sullenly, "Everything alright up here?"

A nod. Another drag. They sat in silence, the boy coupling his shoulders for warmth. The permeating snow had already been a thing they, and many others, adjusted to, and when paired with the dulled morning sun in the gray, cloud ridden sky, it served as a reminder; this is as warm as it gets.

A grim reminder, at that.

"What happened last night," the girl asks.

They sit in silence for a moment or two before the boy looks down and swallows hard, as if afraid to say the words.

"Another dream?"

A slow nod turned quick, yet still as weary.

Another drag. She turns to the boy and their eyes connect. Both tired out of their minds, still.

"I-" the boy starts out, exhausted sounding, "I… saw a person... or something that looks like one, last night."

"And you didn't think to tell me."

"They, it, were... or was on a roof... They,  _it_  jumped."

After another drag, she rids the cigarette of ash. The free hand of the girl finds the back of her neck and rubs.

The boy's tired look strayed to the horizon. Another dawn, another day, more travel, more ways to lose life and limb.

He gets up from the ledge the two were sat at and heads back. Shortly after her cigarette were finished, she joined him, sitting in silence.

It dawned on the boy what he said earlier; the person that jumped. They found themselves packed up and outside of their building, heading in a general direction.

He froze and looked back up to where he assumed their place of temporary residence and then to the adjacent building. Figuring out where the body should have landed, he went around the corner in a wide arc, to the front of the building, where the body should have been.

Much to his shock, there was not a stain or body to be found.

And much to his relief, his companion was not there to witness it. The boy walked back to the front of the building, continuing to wait for his twin, a storm plucking every picket fence and tree in his mind.

The rifle they.. ahem,  _procured_ , from the fine gentleman in the woods had decided to cease and desist on its own accord; its days numbered by the squib load that decided its fate mid heated gunfight that was luckily finished quick after what had happened.

Its wielder was lucky, the girl walked away from the firearm in a daze as the aforementioned and unnoticed squib load stuck in the middle of the barrel, leaving the barrel in a mushroomed state, incapable of accurate fire.

Without the necessary knowledge or material to repair it, it was disposed of in a field-strip state.

The rest of their equipment went somewhat unchanged, rations staying in a somewhat similar situation compared to before due to managing to scavenge some food along the way.

The girl's companion was always against weapons, mostly for that precise reason, even considering the fact that a squib load wasn't precisely often, especially if the gun is taken care of.

With renegade, man-killing looters, that was not the case. Surprise surprise.

Having packed up and abandoned anything unusable, they set out to the I-5, the main highway leading through the two major cities.

The silence was often times mind-numbing. Luckily, they had the occasional run-in with an animal or a person, for once, which kept them on their toes and gave a refreshing change of pace every now and then but even with that, those moments were few and far between.

Then, of course, some people are less friendly than others. This one time, they saw a woman followed by two cats that were, somehow, still unharmed. She was completely insane and  _not to mention armed somehow,_ which was, well, an interesting development to say the least.

So that had them running quick.

They once met a merchant who made a living going from settlement to settlement and sold his goods. He was one of very few that still had a running vehicle those days due to the complete collapse.

Its wondrous what a complete and total lack of civilization and control will do to a society in a few years.

But I digress. Where were w- oh, the highway.

The I-5 always saw activity, what with it being massive. Their tracks weren't the only ones, but for all they know, the ones they see now are old still, or maybe there's been so many that anyone can't keep track anymore. That's a thought to keep a person occupied.

Switching between the actual highway and any nearby treeline there was to be had, what little of this current trip had happened was spent in silence, mostly. The boy, still on his toes, seemed like it was best if he was left with his thoughts. The girl had something similar in mind.

The two were quite the odd pair, but being twins and all gives you that connection to one another most people don't have. She read him easily, he read her easily right back, it's kind of like that telepathic thing everyone assumes about twins.

A silence like this wasn't exactly uncommon. The boy had taken their lifestyle when everything was normal far harder than his twin. They spent most of their best years of life jumping from foster to foster. Be it trouble, be it abuse, they found their way around, whether they wanted it or not.

The girl was clinical and straightforward, the more serious of the two, less emotions, more actions. Her deeds were more of a description of her than her words ever truly could be, always one that was more for accuracy of  _things_  rather than people. Hence the affinity to weapons.

The boy almost held enough emotion for the both of them. Protective, often to the point of his own demise, he was still serious, yet more trusting of the two, while loyalty and empathy were a given. Brute strength and force amassed alone for the need to protect others was enough to grow a love of fighting and close-combat.

Loyalty and empathy were a given, thus meaning their repercussions were never far behind. The emotions his twin-sister lacked were readily available to any person willing to reciprocate in similar degree. One such person was found before but… No one truly lives happily ever after, now do they?

But alas, one must play the hand he is dealt. They were an odd pair, yet they made the best of it until  _someone_  decided to start a greed-fueled nuclear war. That's a topic for another time, though.

The boy was becoming increasingly uneasy with the silence, evident with the way he fiddled around with the bag strung off to his side. The girls eyes hooded, yet aware, kept a watchful eye out.

"What's up with you, all of a sudden," she asks in a questioning, yet hushed tone. Trying to keep their voice down and all that.

The boy blinked quickly a few times before sputtering an answer, "..I- I- Uhm.. It's- It's nothing."

Shutting her eyes, she exhaled nasally, somewhat annoyed yet understanding. She turned with a scratch to her forehead.

"Look, it's obvious it's not nothing. You're not often like this."

Opening his mouth to say something proved pointless as he instead opted on deflating.

A scratch to his neck was almost a queue to his twin's sigh and turn. They continue right after.

Feeling visibly guilty, the boy raised a hand and finger to say something before he's cut off by the sound of a gunshot ringing off around them.

They both instinctively hide behind the nearest cover, the boy ending up in the ditch and the girl at a van off to the left on the highway. After the initial shock of shot goes down, they realize it was far. Straight in front of them, but far, luckily. No doubt another run in with the mercenaries from before.

They wait in silence for a little while longer and hear another one go off. Neither of them flinch this time, neither of them move from their spot this time.

The girl sighed nasally and shook her head while the boy kept his head high, listening closely. They looked at each other and nodded.

The two of them spread about the highway, skipping from cover to cover, inching closer to the source of the shots. Being well-versed in weaponry, the girl could recognize the shots. The unknown sound of a caliber that was too small-sounding to  _not_  be a pistol, echoed the air as the wielder of the firearm fired two more shots.

The closer the girl got to the source, the closer the struggling sounded, sprinkled with the occasional grunt or low scream. What the girl saw once her interest piqued and she looked over the wreck was a boy in his early twenties, maybe late teens with chestnut hair, a long coat and a pistol, attempting to fend off a few mutants from the top of a car.

Before the girl had a chance to help or retaliate, the boy was pulled down from the top of the truck with a cry for help and enveloped in a tangle of limbs and mindless groans.

With a sigh and a shut of her eyes, she found her way back into cover, back against the rough surface of the tipped car and slid to the floor, sitting down as the noise of the survivor getting torn apart rang in her ears.

Her companion, who moved towards a similar objective until recently, stood in stunned silence with a horrified expression before he hurried to the same cover and kneeled at his twin's side, hands hovering, eyes dancing.

"You alright," he asked in a hushed but worried voice. A gesture later, the girl got up. Once situated on her feet, she motioned for the two of them to get the hell away.

The sound of clanking metal draws their attention as the gun from the appetizer's hand lands a few feet from them.

The pair of twins stare at each other, then at the gun for a moment, before the sound of struggle dies down. The girl makes a mad dash for the pistol, taking it quickly and running back to her twin.

Hoping not to become the main course, they make it from the scene, keeping silent.

They were fine until the girl brought up the idea of going back, where she's met with a distressed 'What?!'

'He might have had something good; who carries around a pistol," she gestured to the one she picked up, an FN Five-Seven, "like  _this_  and not bring anything worthwhile with them?"

No wonder she couldn't recognize it; the Five-Seven has its own specific caliber, kinda rare.

The boy's jaw was clamped tight as he looked at his twin.

An annoyed sigh and a shake of his head later, he mutters precisely how bad this idea is, but they go back anyways.

The mutants have long since moved on, much to their delight.

They find the mangled body of the late teen, his age now undeniably harder to figure out.

A shudder later, the girl is rummaging through his belongings as her twin keeps an eye out. A small box of ammo that fits the caliber of the gun she found, some envelopes, clothes and toiletries later, she stumbles on a small ziplock baggie. With a bemused sigh, she tosses the weed baggie to the side and continues.

What stared back when she did was an envelope, a red mark across it and most of its contents spilling out. Gingerly picking it up, she delved into its contents deeper.

A key ring, with two keys on it and a letter. The letter was formal in format but contents were meant to someone closer, yet it felt  _very_ clinical.

It pertained information of some sort of transport of members.

"Maddie, we might not want to stay here for long," her twin called out in a shaky and aware voice.

"Give me a second," the girl mused and continued reading. Transport of members, security, Seattle, experiment…

 

Making barely any sense of it at the moment, she pockets the letter and turns to leave.

* * *

 "Hey, Mason," the girl starts, breaking the silence after they walk quite the way from the area of incident.

 

"Hm?"

"I-... I don't understand what the hell this means."

"Are you still worrying over that letter you found?"

Madison nods with a finger curled under her chin, her other hand holding the same letter.

"I mean… I- What transport, what members? Fuck's the 'Vortex Club'? What do they have to do in Seattle?"

All Mason can do is shrug. With an exasperated sigh, Madison lets her hands fall at her sides.

"There's something about  _experiments_  or something like that, also a date."

"What date?"

"July twenty-ninth, two thousand and nine."

Mason squints, trying to remember, "Doesn't ring a bell," to no avail; he chimes.

The girl's shoulders drop and the letter is balled up and thrown to her side.

"Screw this."

They continue most of their trip in silence.

But allow me let you in on a little secret; a tip or a cheat if you will.

July 29th, 2009 is the day the bombs were launched; is the day when  _all_  of this started. 


	3. CHAPTER TWO: ALL OUR THOUGHTS AND UNCERTAINTIES

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things never do tend to look up for long. 
> 
> All has its ups and downs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I don't know what a schedule is either. ~~Mostly because there is none.~~
> 
> Few months late on this, but for a good reason! I was expanding horizons!
> 
> Here's this trainwreck, then, enjoy if you can. 
> 
> And thanks for reading, <3

It was instinct, really.

 

The moment Chloe saw what she saw, her hands moved; instinct, like she thought, to the rifle holstered on her shoulder.

“I-I don’t like this, Chloe,” Max stuttered out.

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,” she replied, in a tone as hushed as Max’s as she hurried to get the rifle from her shoulder and into her hands.

The grizzly scene unfurled in front of them was one of a man’s corpse, torn apart by what they could only word as _monster_ , was not a sightly one. The man's plaid shirt barely held onto what of the torso was torn off, deep cuts through the one arm that’s left and jeans ripped at the legs, with broken legs to match.

But no head. Unsurprising, judging by the state of the rest of the body.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Max admitted to Chloe and the snow as it gently fell around them.

“I’m not too far from it, either,” Chloe replied.

Chloe held her rifle tight with her finger off the trigger and Max… well, Max just looked, stunned, in a lowered position, keeping her frame down to the ground.

Can you blame her? Not like she has anything else to be doing.

 

Despite that, both of them noticed the mist that had settled over the town at the same time.

Chloe circled the corpse, with her eyes scouting everything she could see from where she stood. Max did the same, only barely moving behind Chloe. Both of them stood in anticipation of _something_ , with neither of them knowing precisely what, but they had a feeling.

However long spent in anticipation was fruitless. Chloe swallowed hard, Max exhaled heavily in a hushed, still careful manner.

“Maybe… Maybe whatever did this is gone,” Max procured carefully and hopefully.

Chloe shrugged with a long noise, dipped in a tone of anguish, “I don’t know, Max… This is here for a reason,” she states, “and something tells me whatever brought it here wants to parade it some more.”

“We probably shouldn’t stick around to fi-”

Chloe had her back turned to Max and couldn’t precisely see what exactly it is that whipped her across the chest with enough force to shoot her into the fence behind her.   


“Max!!”

Chloe ran to where Max stood moments before, wide eyed and in shock, checking for where her friends body landed. She could see her in the settling snow and wooden fence fragments, knocked out cold.

Her gritted teeth managed to calm her a little. Once she deduced that Max was still breathing, a weight dropped from her shoulders and her attention was brought elsewhere.

The culprit heaved behind her. A decrepit body, taller than her by a head, dark and yellow eyes, sickly, grey skin, decorated by growths and dark marks of old, dried blood.

Its head was, besides bald, missing a part of the top of its skull, the skin under its malformed, glazed over eyes darker than the rest and its mouth was… nowhere to be seen, despite the _devouring_ display Chloe had the pleasure of witnessing before hand.  

Tentacles or some sort of long appendages of a similar type protruded from its chest. Some were longer than the others and the… _thing_ roughly fit the appearance of what her and Max saw from the house before and the aforementioned scene.

Chloe noticed she was shaking and it took her a few moments to get her grip back. She swallowed hard.

The creature stood there, almost as if it were challenging her. Chloe noticed this and took on her own stance, stock at her shoulder, finger on the trigger and she rose the rifle slowly.

After another moment, the creature took a step towards Chloe, swinging one of its appendages at her.

Chloe dodged the swing, away from Max, and took a shot. It landed in the creatures shoulder. It continued its stoic steps as if nothing happened.

Another swing of the appendages got Chloe to move again.

Once moving, Chloe was able to dodge what quick strikes the monster dispensed, and upon every dodge, Chloe shot at… whatever, she couldn't figure out what to call it for the life of her.

Especially not at a time like this. 

 _Eleven rounds_ , Chloe reminded herself, was all her worn carbine had at disposal at that time. So far, she had fired off four, a single bullet with every dodge or jump, which makes seven. 

The creature showed no change in movement; it moved completely unfazed. Another swing, another dodge and another bullet that she fires. This one, though, caused a reaction, much to Chloe's momentary wonder.

The until-now stoic creature reeled, flinching in pain. The shot landed closer to the center of its chest, close to where the appendages had sprouted, rather than around.

Dodging and shooting accurately was not a skill Chloe acquired; she never figured she’d be in situation similar to this, but she seemed to have found a way.

Chloe narrowed her eyes.

_Bing -oh, shit._

 

Sadly, in her last bout of thought and discovery, Chloe lost a little of her focus. The most recent swing gripped the appendage around the barrel of her rifle but luckily, with the stock of it, she knocked the appendage in question away, before the creature had a chance to tug it out of her hands. 

Giving herself distance, she aimed carefully, firing off two rounds square into the chest cavity.

Lo and behold, another reaction.

The limbs of the creature shook, a seizure-like manner, for a short moment. Before returning to a normal, albeit a bit more disheveled and faster than before.

The smug grin wiped off Chloe’s face about as fast as it got there, she realizes that barely did anything.

“Ah, fu-” is all she eeks out once she realizes what amount of noise she must’ve made, before she also gets hit in a similar manner to Max.

She flies behind and onto her back, out into the rest of the open, snow-filled street. Her rifle was cast away to somewhere to the side of her on impact, as she helplessly watches the creature amble towards her.

In a fit of coughing, she attempts to get back onto her feet but slips, once, twice, cursing the second time.

“Come on, damn it, why _now_ ,” she says to no one in particular, but she's stopping only when she hears something, something she can't identify and before she knows it, a cloud of dark smoke appears around the creature with a sizzling sound shortly after one of an impact.

 

Chloe isn’t quite sure from where that came from, but once she hears an ungodly hiss, she makes a mad dash to her weapon, grabbing it and aiming at the thick cloud where the creature once stood, only for her sights to come up empty.

“It’s gone,” she whispers in disbelief. 

Chloe takes a little while to get used to that fact and continues to be on full alert when she notices a slimy trail leading away from her. She remembers Max after a few moments.

“Max,” she exclaims to herself in a loud whisper through coughs, hopping up and dashing to the girl, who Chloe had hoped had awoken as she made her way to her. 

Chloe digs through what little snow and fragmented fence was around Max in a hurry, wanting to pick up the body of her friend urgently, and get them to safety.

“Come on, Max, don’t do this to me,” Chloe pleads under her breath with her friend in her arms as she makes her way to the house.  

 

She runs to get her to safety, barely paying attention to much else besides preserving the anonymity and secrecy of their hideout.

 

*** * ***

 

Madison found the Five-Seven to be… a fairly clunky-to-hold weapon, at least in her eyes.

 

And in her weirdly small, little hands that Mason used to tease her about, no less, the asshole.

Well, no matter, a little tape and a little bit of learning is all she needed to manage the pistol a little better than before.

Luckily, she brought the ammo, too, and a fair bit of it. She _might_ need it, she realized.

They found themselves in an abandoned little shack, in the middle of nowhere, camping out on their trip to Seattle or wherever there might be people, y’know, just following rumors.

But hey, if anything, this middle of nowhere shack has people. Albeit, its people they don’t know, and they're armed. 

That’s why they’re both hiding, right now.

I guess a ‘be careful what you wish for’ is in order here, because: people _is_ what they wanted, people is what they got. All of it chalks up to the details though, for they could’ve used people that lack the intention to kill others.

Maddie comes to realize at times like this that the guard duty they both agreed on was a smart idea.  She owes Mason for coming up with that.

Maddie can hear the creaking of the floorboards in the room she’s in. Her head is still but her eyes move like two moths dancing around a single flame. She’s following the movement of the intruder’s flashlight.

It disappears soon and she can hear the rummaging on the inside of a cupboard nearby. _Perfect timing,_ she thinks. She still has that borrowed old trench knife Mason found, and since he worries about her safety, he hasn’t asked for it back.

_‘Quit waving that gun around, you need to know some hand-to-hand defense.’_

His words, not hers.

 

She takes it out the holster on her arm and moves in, slowly. A clink of a can far off stops her dead in her tracks and she spots Mason, the one who tossed that can, a room away. The intruder in question, close to Maddie, stands up and chooses to explore for whoever knocked the can over.

“Who’s there?! Quit hiding, we know you’re in here!”

_We._

Mason motions her to shush and shakes his head. _Don’t move_ , he must mean, or _Don’t kill him_. With the same hand that motioned, he points behind him and signs the number three.

_This guy here must have friends._

Maddie exhales through her nose and slides the knife back in its position. She peeks over the bar top she’s hiding behind and into the kitchen, where the intruder last was. He left the explored cupboards open.

Her ears perked up as she treated slowly, away and through the kitchen, into the living room, closer to the stairs that lead down, into the basement.

Mason was nowhere to be found, much to his luck, because Maddie spotted someone sweeping the area he was at last.

Maddie sighed relief to the fact neither of them got spotted. Yet.

She heard the patter of feet from the kitchen and realized she was out in the open, deer-in-headlights-esque. She made a dash for the steps down and prayed.

 

Someone heard her, “Who’s there,” and her blood ran cold, even with the scoff to boot. 

_Tsk, let me just answer that real quick._

Whoever spotted her did not move, though, much to her luck, only kept the flashlight pointed. The _whoever_ in question walked off.

“...Fuck this place, spooky as shit…”

 

A few minutes of complete silence later, Maddie noticed her eyes getting used to the dark.  _Nifty._

“What did we even check this place for, dude, its empty,” she hears. 

“I don’t know, man, I don’t know.”

"Screw this man. Sam! Bill," the southern-drawled man rose his voice, "Let’s get the fuck out!”

The impact of boots against wood coupled with mutters rang through the house and soon enough, a click of a door and silence interrupted by the occasional boot stomp against wet snow was all that could be heard.

A minute or two passes in more complete silence, despite the fact the boot stomps stopped minute prior.

“What the _fuck_ was that,” Mason asks, fittingly.

 

Maddie and Mason rise at the same time from different places in the house.

“No idea. But _those_ tools,” she points at the closed door, “looked like the same tools that we saw on the highway a few days back.”

Mason checks the windows and readjusts the curtain after leaving aforementioned window, “Yeah, I think so too, they wore similar clothes to them.” 

“What were they looking for here? There’s no chance it was us they were looking for.”

“Supplies probably. For a snowstorm, chances are, seeing as the snows starting to pick up. I just hope we haven’t kicked a hornet’s nest by killing off that one guy.”

“And we need to move, perfect timing,” Maddie said, with her hands falling against her sides.

Mason nods, draws out an ‘mhm’ and heads to their things, “I’d suggest packing up, since we _do_ need to move and quite fast. If that snow picks up any more we’re gonna be stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”

And so they do. And so they were.

 

They’re both lucky, really. They managed to hide anything of use before any of the intruders found anything.

Now, they just have to make it through the storm if they can. Because they aren’t lucky, because the timing wasn’t as perfect as it seemed.

 

Much to their _complete_ surprise, the snow picks up and it’s a full-blown storm very, very soon. They’re both bundled head to toe in white, though, trudging through the snow and wind.

They’re both on edge as much as they can be with limited visibility, but they roughly understood which way they _should_ be headed. Should.

 

Maddie’s mind is whirring. Both with worries of the world, worries of their own, worries of this storm and worries of what it is she precisely discovered on that highway.

It bothered her and yet there was nothing she could do about any of that.

Despite the fact the snow has other plans; she slips, almost zoned out completely, and takes a fall, her squeak lost to the wind. She lands behind-first into the fresh snow after a little struggle to stay up and Mason is right there to help her out.

Mason’s mind is devoid of much trouble, which is unusual. There’s something about the snow he finds to be calming, as he was always more of a winter person, anyways, despite their current situation.

He _is_ worried for the both of them, though. He always wonders if there is anyone still alive past what they’ve already seen.

They pass a sign and Mason tugs at the rope to tell Maddie to stop. She does, and they both head to it.

Clearing it of snow, he looks for the directions. They agreed to go to this small place called Arcadia Bay; a little out of the way, but a solid enough stop between their position and Seattle itself.

They also heard of more rumors about an encampment of some sort between the Bay and Seattle, nestled within the trees.

They’re just whispers, though, Mason thinks.

 

Yet he remains hopeful as he tugs the rope and walks again, passing the sign and going through _even more_ snow. Who knew there’d be more snow? Not Mason, that's for sure. 

He nods to Maddie, who nods back and they set off again.

An undefined amount of time has passed since they’ve seen that sign.

Scratch that, and change it to ‘seen _anything’,_ for that matter.

Madison’s eyes are wide, under her goggles,  despite seeing nothing but white for the past few hours. Her legs are screaming about as much as she wishes she could right now.

Her eyes widened because it was the second time around that the wind, howling and whistling past her ears, had _pushed_ her off balance. She never assumed things would get this bad and she was slowly starting to panic.

The occasional tug at the rope still tied between her twin and her both instilled panic and brought her ease, because she knew he was still there but also that there might be a problem, a reason to why he stopped.

Only her darkest fears contained the thought of the rope going limp and the other end coming up empty.

She swallowed hard and pushed, on and on, careful to avoid thoughts like those.  

Mason wasn’t in much of a better way than his sibling counterpart.

He was breathing heavy, panicked slightly and alert, hoping nothing comes out at them and sideswipes them in the snow.

And his worries were defused, because the trouble _didn’t,_ in fact, come from the side, but rather the front.

 

Before he knew what hit him, literally, his sister and him flew back. A large tree, he assumed, slammed into his twin, taking them both to the ground.

 

_Maddie._

In the dazed state, he looked for his sister. Things were over before he knew it.

He saw his sibling breathing heavy in the snow, peppered heavily with a fresh coat of it, barely moving.

He managed to crawl to her slowly, losing consciousness by the second.   


The world grew dark when their hands intertwined.

 

*** * ***

 

Chloe stared at the snowfall from the comfort of Max’s desk.

 

With Max laying on the bed, still knocked out, but patched up, in all her bruised-ness, Chloe pondered, with nothing smarter to do, hoping to not impose.

As she nursed her mug of hot chocolate, watching the snow fall gingerly, she thought. About a lot.

Mostly of Max, hoping she was alright. When she had managed to bring her up, which wasn’t very hard, to be honest, Max is a lot thinner than Chloe, she had to invade a little bit of her personal space, to check the impact area.

The aforementioned impact area was injury-free, albeit bruised. Chloe gave Max’s midriff a quick clean and disinfect, and secured a bandage over it, unable to deduce any other injuries, past her luckily minor external ones.

Chloe thinks that, before, seeing that part of Max wasn’t much of a problem. But _now_ , after spending so much far apart and Max spending most of that time alone and doing god knows what, for all Chloe knows she might just wake up screaming in the middle of Chloe helping her and slap her straight across the face as a first reaction.

Chloe assumes that living alone for so long does things to you and she can only begin to imagine. She also can’t help but not feel like a prick for being angry at Max, for never communicating. 

Despite the fact she never attempted to communicate back. Chloe slumps in her seat. 

Chloe also couldn’t help but notice the differences in Max. It's a different experience from when she’s awake. Whereas before, Max was on guard and a little tense, but she’s calm now, and even blissful might be an appropriate word.

Really pretty, too.

 

 _Damn it, Chloe, not now,_ she thinks and shakes her head. _Stop being a useless lesbian for a second and think straight_.

She snorts at that thought, still shaking her head, and goes back to thinking.

What _has_ Max been through? Has she had it rough, was there even anyone there for her? Has it just been her since what happened?

_Jesus…_

If the accident happened…

_Five years ago._

The thought harrowed through Chloe’s chest, leaving her hauntingly breathless. She struggled imagining the solitude and the risks. She had been lucky, she realizes.

_Oh, Max…_

 

With her feet up against the edge of Max’s desk, Chloe realizes she’s been staring at her. Like a weirdo.

She shakes her head and looks to her mug.

 _What’s in this,_ she asks herself, looking down into the mug and stirring.

With a weary sigh, Chloe goes back to thinking. Thinking how she got into this situation, thinking what led her here, and thinking about the inevitable. Her parents.

 

Both had gone missing two years prior to the destruction of her camp, and she was left alone. Her dad went missing on a scavenger run and her mom was lost a little after in a bandit attack that didn't escalate particularly. 

Except for that. 

Back-then Chloe was still young, and right-now Chloe still remembers how hard she cried.

She tugs the beanie over her eyes, trying to avoid shedding a tear. She’s shed enough of those, she thinks.

Luckily for her, someone came along at that time, someone who would take in the one extra mouth to feed; the liability, as some of the less enthusiastic members of the community would call her.

 

A fairly older woman, named Phoebe. Or, as Chloe knew her, the biggest bad ass to have roamed this planet.

On second thought, that was probably her imagination running wild, but Chloe loved the stories Phoebe told her.

 

She was a fair skinned, ginger woman, in her late forties, maybe early fifties, who had seen a lot with her bright green eyes.

 

Phoebe at the time was a field medic, serving in an impromptu, nameless war Chloe never even knew went on.

According to her, before the mist had taken its toll as much as it has now, there was a lot more open land, thus much more conflict for said areas.

Some sort of rogue paramilitary had been on the fritz, eager for some cheap land to expand and control the communities popping up around. There _was_ talk of them being under rule of some cock-head, Phoebe’s words, called Sean Prescott.

Chloe had never heard the name, but judging on that rumor alone, she can tell he was a less than savoury character.

 

 _People without much fighting for a little dominance. The human ego really_ does _go far._

Chloe remembers more: the physical training, the medical training that she enjoyed the most, getting to shoot a gun and other useful tricks. She sighs and realizes precisely how helpless she’d be.

_Thanks for everything, Phee, wherever you are._

Max stirs as Chloe sniffles and stares over her shoulder with one eye barely peeking under the beanie. She’s half hoping Max wakes up and half hoping she stays asleep; the last thing she needs right now is for her to see her like this.

All Max does, to Chloe’s relief, is mumble something in her sleep and wiggle a little.

_Phew._

Chloe’s mouth stayed agape in thought slightly as she stares out into the snow for a little longer, with her beanie adjusted properly, now; in thought, yet thinking of nothing, just a moment of peace between herself and the mug of hot chocolate.


	4. CHAPTER THREE: THE TIDAL WAVES OF FEAR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We're at the 'down' part. There doesn't seem to be an 'up' in sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back with more of this. If anyone even reads this, feedback would be greatly appreciated. 
> 
> <3

Max eventually awakes, nowhere near where she expected to be.

 

“Chloe!” she screams, regretting the action immediately. With the scream, a sharp pain echoed through her lower back and parts of her midriff, then started bouncing around in her ribcage, like a child in a candy store.

Max hisses, rubbing at the sore spots along her back that she can reach, before finally asking herself the million dollar question.

“Where the hell am I?”

 

In the middle of a huge, empty, unfamiliar field, was the answer, much to Max’s dismay.

She can’t remember any field near the Bay area that looks anything like this one; barren, gray with splotches of green, bushes tacked on top, some of which were wilting, the occasional stone protruding from the ground.  

And no snow, oddly enough, just the thick layer of clouds above her, grey as stone across the entire sky, making it impossible to tell the time of day by the position of the sun.

 _“Fuck,”_ Max swears under her breath.

She stands up after looking around for a little, seeing nothing but foliage and _flatness_. Dusting herself off, Max wonders what the _hell_ is going on. The landscape seems to just _stop_ after a while, but Max can’t see that far.

None of this felt natural.

Straightening out, Max took another look around her.

In the middle of her orientation is when she spots the mirror. She double-takes at first, not believing her eyes. Eventually her eyes settle on it and, she blinks at it some.

 _That wasn’t there before_ , she thought.

Max was correct, it wasn’t; yet, there it sits.

After enough doubting blinks, she decides to take a cautious step towards it. Enough of those later, she starts walking towards it normally. It takes an abnormal amount of time to reach it, way more than she had first anticipated.

She approaches the mirror, the basic, scratched up, dusty mirror, sitting on a rusted gray metal frame. It looked like a mirror stand you would find in an abandoned hospital, which only helped in creeping Max out.

Max wipes off some dust so she can see the reflection in the mirror properly, regretting it when the dust stays on her sleeve. She tries to shake it off.

 _It just looks like a normal mirror_ , Max thinks, until her reflection smiles at her.

She jumps back with a terrified gasp and falls inelegantly on her ass.

_What the fuck?!_

Max blinks some, trying to understand if she really did see what she did or if she is in fact going insane.

She shakes her head with a hand to her forehead.

 _Solitude is hard on the brain, but I don’t think I’ve gone_ completely _insane. Yet._

She gets up again and takes careful steps back to the mirror. Even though her reflection _seems_ normal, she squints at it, expecting something else.

Yet nothing happens.

Max scratches at her forehead. “I _must_ be going insane,” she says, aloud and to no one in particular.

“Probably,” answers back the mirror.

Yes, the mirror.

 

The surface of the mirror _bubbles_ as a glassy presence forms from inside the mirror and takes steps towards Max, stretching the glass out, while she stares, bewildered. With this look on her face, she falls backwards again, crawling away from whatever the hell it was.

The intruder strains against the glass, grasping and reaching out, with the occasional thrown punch against its glassy barrier. Once one foot steps onto the ground, though, the glass shatters.

A bit more struggling and the _whatever_ that just came out of the mirror is out. It falls down on all fours, gasping for breath.

“Ow,” it says in a voice oddly familiar to Max.

 _It_ sat upwards and cracked its neck, then it's shoulders, collapsing its hands together and tugging back.

“Dog, that’s always so annoying.”

Max’s original reflex had been to hide, but… she instead opts to just sit there on account  of her inability to move.

The lack of hiding spots didn’t do much in her favor. She stood there, willing to say something but unable, instead just opening and closing her mouth.

Whatever ‘it’ is notices Max eventually, and a sly grin pours onto its face.

“Hi, you must be Max.

“I’m you. Nice to meet you, me.”

 

*** * ***

 

“What the _fuck_?!”

“Whoa, Max, what’s with the tone? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the Other Max says, and looks around with a grin.

“W-w-what the hell _are_ you?!”

Other Max scoffs, “I’m you, stupid. Now stand up, you look like an idiot.”

Max opens her mouth to say something but instead looks down. Not-Max was right. She gets up since she did _kind of_ look like an idiot.

She dusts off, “Okay, will you answer me now,” Max asks rather harshly, “What the hell _are_ you?!”

“Oh silly, I already _did_ answer you. I’m you,” _it_ answered in a cheerful voice which at all did not match the situation the two found themselves in.

“Now,” it started, “with introductions out of the way, I’ll do my job, if you don’t mind.”

Other Max takes steps toward the original. Max _wants_ to ask her counterpart what it's doing but the question is a tad late at the tip of her tongue.

One quick movement later, and Other Max’s hands are gripping the original Max’s head on either side. Max chooses to fight back and pries off one hand, sending a punch flying into  Other Max’s stomach.

She jumps back in an attempt to gain distance but it's no use. Other Max _leaps_ and grips her head again in a similar fashion and slowly, as Max starts blacking out, she spots…

Thick smoke, in plumes. Coming from the Other Max’s eyes, and accompanied with the widest smile Max has ever seen herself pull.

She’d describe it as the epitome of _evil_ , if she had the chance.

 

*** * ***

 

Max doesn’t have the slightest clue as to what is going on.

She had reacted against her other self, trying to pry herself away again but instead was tossed into _another_ dream.

Only in this one, everything around her was pitch black.

She gets up from the… nonexistent ground, and moves her hands around once she notices something, her face a mess of reactions. She was unsure which to pick.

She sees the way her hands trail behind her own as if she was multiple copies of herself at once, only slightly delayed, one behind the other.

Before she has a chance to think, there’s a warped noise from somewhere behind her.

Out of the middle of the pitch black, out of thin air, flies Other Max, coming right at Max with a fist leveled at her face.

Other Max disappears into thin air right before her punch connects with Max.

It happens again, only from a different direction. And again, but it's a knee this time. Max can hear laughing and-- and a scraping of some sort, but none of it makes any sense to her.

She’s sure the scraping is inside her head.

Her hands and forearms start hurting. They hurt like nothing she’s felt before and they burn, from the inside. So much so that Max is doubled-over within the second, clutching her hands to her stomach.

It hurts to the point where her vision slowly fades.

It's not long before she has another dream, and Max thinks they’re more visions than dreams at this point. And again, it's a familiar scene.

An _old,_ yet still very familiar scene.

She’s in the backseat of a car, passing familiar scenery strewn with people, their identity concealed in numerous ways, hoods over their heads.

She can hear loud voices on the other side of the windows, and see two figures with their blurred faces looking around in panic in the front seats. Their voices are completely muffled and indistinguishable, almost like she’s listening through water.

Yet she swears she could remember and repeat every word of what they said that day. Almost down to the way they said it.

Her face slowly falls, to flatness and defeat, and it only continues to do so even as the front part of the car is engulfed in flame and, in the midst of the panic, the car flies off the highway and into a ditch.

Max instinctively raises her hands in front of her face for protection, but before she knows it, the image she sees is torn away from before her eyes.

Her eyes open and hands lower slowly, after a long pause. Tears stain her cheeks already, and Max falls on her back, without even noticing at first.

She only notices when she sees the pitch blackness flood the space around her.

The recollection this time is one of her very first nights alone. She remembers the way her hands trembled against her chest in the cold, cold nights.

Knees close to herself, she hid in a ransacked, hopefully empty house, mere earshot distance of a man that was emptying the magazine of what Max guessed was a handgun. She had no idea.

The clicks came soon, trailed by said man’s pained, horrific screaming; immediately after came harrowing silence.

The worst type of silence, Max realized that day.

Or night, rather.

 

Suddenly, the world flips on itself and in a flurry of dark colors, Max’s body falls from a short height, chest first, into a splash of blinding white.

With the air knocked out of her lungs, she coughs and hacks. The snow, painful and stinging cold against her face, is a harsh reminder that she has other, crucial things at hand at the moment.

But they all seem small compared to the bullet whizzing above her head. Max falls back down out of fear and, in search of cover, finds a large rock to which she flits to on her stomach.

Another bullet, and another.

They’re not aimed at her. She raises her head and traces the rock with her hands, reaching the top eventually. She peeks over only to find out the shots weren’t even at her.

She spots someone moving from cover to cover, only to get shot. The coat seemed familiar to her, as she realizes from in cover.

Her eyes go wide with realization, “Chloe!”

She jumps up only to see her assailant finish her off.

Jaw wide, Max falls against the rock, expecting support, instead finding the same, dark void as before.

While falling, she catches the faintest glimpse of that clone of hers laughing.

The real Max doesn’t find this very funny.

 

She falls through the floor again with her eyes shut, feeling as though she had just woken up.

Her eyes open eventually, and her head sideways and her vision blurry. Max finds herself in an unfamiliar place. 

The smell is what hits her before her vision does, and its a smell she wouldn't describe as enjoyable. In front of her were stone walls lined with lockers, and a single, dingy light illuminating the room in her view. 

Two people stand under that light, having a conversation. It seems like an argument more and more by the second. 

And at one point, it got messy. In the form of one party pulling a knife on the other. The party without the knife raises their hands in defense, but its futile. The knife glides sideways across their oesophagus in a swift motion, and it hasn't had enough. 

The attacker jabs the bloodied knife under the chin, upwards, into the upper part of the mouth. The victims arms clutch to the attacker's. With the attacker letting go, the recently deceased slumps to the floor. 

Max can barely breathe, let alone move. She realizes soon that she  _can't_ move, even if she wants to. Even as the attacker approaches rapidly, knife raised. 

Before they strike, though, everything is gone again. 

Max falls through the pitch black. 

She finds herself stumbling. Stumbling right into a puddle, in the middle of a wide, barely illuminated hall. 

There's natural light in the centre of it all, above a... piano. A large one. As her hearing comes back, she hears the melody. 

Its unsettlingly familiar. The pianist, on the other hand, in tattered clothing and all is unfamiliar; their face, concealed with hair, Max sees the energy put into the playing and is taken aback. 

The playing stops with a sudden slam of the keys. 

In her next blink, all of it is gone. 

She falls more, and its getting a little old. Still frightening, though. 

With her eyes shut, failing to move, Max can only assume where she is now. Her eyes open to see a man standing next to a door, facing her, right next to a locker in another dimly lit room. 

Before she knows what's going on, the door flies open, a figure walking into the room, a gun pointed to the guard. The guard backs away with hands raised, while the figure approaches Max. 

The locker is thrown down and the guard grabs a stray fire axe, swinging at the extended hand and gun; he hits the firearm and the figure recoils. Approaching, the guard slams the bottom of the fire axe handle into the figure's head and slashes across their throat. 

Max is caught in the spray of blood and screams against the duct tape across her mouth. 

 

Her vision fades again, after a small reprieve in the sense-numbing pitch black, and now she’s in _more_ darkness. A different kind.

Max is suddenly blinking up a storm, and in her last blink, she’s on the field again, laying down with her back straight.

She wipes at the formed tears in silence and sits up sluggishly.

Other Max cackles from behind her.

“Oh, this is hilarious.”

Max turns furiously to stare at Other Max and the vast nothingness behind her. The smoking eyes catch her off guard and Max’s attempt at a steely stare is thrown off for a second.

“W-Why are you doing this,” she stutters in a small voice.

“Because I like to toy with my prey,” Other Max scoffed. “Don’t worry, though, I’m not all bad news.”

 

Other Max is soon in front of Actual Max and she grabs ahold of her head again, this time with Exhausted Max providing nothing but a feeble attempt at a response. What she sees, this time, is more an image rushing past her than anything else.

A wide, snow-covered field with a few, Max couldn’t discern how many, dark spots, standing out in the untouched white.

 

The next moment, she finds herself standing in the middle of it all, her balance thrown off. She stumbles a little at first but recovers.

Other Max passes through her and Max feels a chill run unpleasantly through her body, and that same chill goads her chest and forces a cough out.

Other Max smirks at her and points.

“This is near you. What you find there can help you. Bring a sled, or something,” she shrugs flippantly.   
“I will also tell you this: someone close to you has more than they might imagine. Be careful what you say, to whom and when and most of all, be careful who you trust.”

Other Max’s eyes turn a shade of black, much to Max’s horror.

“The story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.”

 

She blinks, then screams in panic and confusion while she plunges through the void at a high speed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: Beta'd and sifted through for errors by the awesome and wonderful [spiderstanspiderstan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderstanspiderstan) aka Nano, go check their stuff out if you like the MCU!


	5. CHAPTER FOUR: KEPT IN THE DARK

Chloe sighs, as she flips to the next page of the book she’s not reading. The book had been something completely random she pulled off Max's shelf without even bothering to look much at its cover or the back. She just needed something to pass the time. Chloe hoped she didn’t have to get far before Max woke up.

  
  
Waiting for Max to wake up with nothing but the silence, the crackling static of radio and the howling wind outside of the window outside got a little boring, especially so after she finished the instant oatmeal Chloe noticed Max had left out by the stove.   
  
Well, the stove wasn't really a stove, just a makeshift set up to work like one, in the other room–     
  
That's beside the point.   
  
So here Chloe sat, at the desk in Max's room, flipping through a random book. Chloe has managed, after the earlier incident, to bring Max back into the house, and tend to any wounds she might have received.   
  
Oddly enough, she seemed relatively unscathed at the first glance, which was... odd to Chloe. In the past, she has seen worse happen for a lot, lot less. The entire time it took Chloe to carry Max back to safety, she couldn’t help the pound of her heart, hoping her rediscovered best friend has lived past their first encounter.

Chloe didn’t need more evidence that she brought bad luck along with her like a ball and chain.

That doesn’t matter right now, most of what happened wasn’t her fault.   
  
Then again, she's also never had the pleasure of meeting a creature like... like that _thing_. That entire experience there was completely new and equally terrifying to Chloe.

She could only start to imagine how Max felt with that entire ordeal, despite being basically out of the fight at the very start.   
  
While tending to Max’s unconscious body, Chloe manages to dig Max out of her old, snow-logged, wet clothes and into fresh ones, which was another weird experience, helped by the fact and assumption that Max could wake up again at any moment.   
  
It's rather weird reuniting with the friend you haven’t seen for something short of five years (not before fighting first) then hiding from monsters right after, then fighting _other_ monsters, then dragging the unconscious body of the other half of the best friendship of your life back to safety and giving them what was basically a sponge bath to ensure their well being and maintain their bodily temperature.   
  
It's actually really weird.   
  
Chloe sighs, tapping her fingers against the edges of the book covers, and looks back to Max, who lays there, still stiff as a rock, no change in her position from how she left her there. She then turns her attention back ahead, to the book and the window in front of her.   
  
That was a stroke of luck, Chloe is sure because she couldn't have imagined trying to fight and then find an unconscious Max in the depth of that _blizzard_ , let alone any other meteorological mishap or disaster.

 _Snowstorms back home never got this serious, but I doubt the weather is much different_ , Chloe rubs at her forehead with worry, _I hope things aren’t changing._ _It's already pretty bad._

Leaning back onto the chair, Chloe checks the cracked wristwatch on her arm, the one holding down a bunch of old, ratted bracelets that she has preserved from a happier life and notes the time. She runs her thumb over all of the bracelets and thinks.   
  
_Max has been out cold for... about forty minutes now, without counting the time she was out cold during the fight_ , Chloe drums her fingers across her face with her chin on the palm of her hand, _I hope she's alright. If it's internal bleeding, I can't really do much for her._   
  
She lets loose a frustrated sigh while running her fingers through her still magically somehow damp, what the hell, hair, and hopes, seeing as that’s all she really can do at a moment like this. Besides be bored, of course.

Her eyes waltz their way over Max another time and Chloe, batting away thoughts of worry, is washed over by a wave of exhaustion. She realizes she hasn’t given herself a one over, so now she's hoping the monster left no marks.

Scars, she didn’t mind, chicks dig scars. But what creates some of them might have some rather unwanted effects on her and her body. So Chloe ambles her way to the bathroom, careful with her steps as to not… actually, that didn’t make sense. She tried waking Max up earlier before this when she just got her into her bed. Nada, no cigar.

Peeling off all the layers to her clothing, Chloe looked at the mirror in Max’s bathroom, noticing it's missing pieces. Once Chloe’s shirt is off, she winces a little, the splotches of discoloration on her stomach sending small pains through her stomach.

 _Nothing out of the ordinary. Just bruises,_ she hisses at one particularly large one on her side, where that _thing_ slapped her across her hip. It hurt like a bitch, both on arrival and now as a bruise. Chloe continues to inspect at her body, part admiring herself, part seriously checking for damage. Her hard work didn’t disappear just yet.

Huffing, her shoulders fall. After realizing all was well, Chloe found a distinct lack of things to do. That book waiting for her on Max’s table had sounded like literally the most boring thing in the world right now, a close second is sitting on that ass-numbing chair and staring out at the pure white outside.

The clothes feel the tiniest bit sticky– just enough to irritate her– as Chloe puts them back on. She chalks it up to the tussle from before; the effort of getting _knocked around like a rag doll_ must have worked up quite the sweat. She only hopes no one can smell it.

Not like there’s anyone around to smell it. Fuck sake.

She shuts the bathroom door in silence and walks back to the room where Max was. In a shocking twist of events, she finds her still in her bed, unperturbed from before. Chloe huffs out of her nose, like a bull, obviously displeased with Max’s state. Something in the back of her head is gnawing at her, telling her that it's her fault Max got harmed.

That little thing gnawing away has a buddy, telling her that Max wouldn’t want to see Chloe again after she wakes, after everything that happens.  

She shakes her head to rustle those little fuckers around, hoping they give her a break; Chloe knew Max wasn’t like that, despite the five years that have passed. Or, rather that she didn’t seem like she changed a bit, so that was Chloe’s assumption.

 _No use sitting around doing nothing,_ Chloe reasons.

Chloe slides her boots on, gets all of her gear back on, shuts the book and puts it back in place, grabs the idle weapon and backpack that are put neatly in a pile under Max’s desk and heads out. Before Chloe makes her way towards the big, _shiny_ door. Well, as shiny as things can get these days.

She double checks the locks on the door as she makes her way outside of Max’s little shelter and down the steps that lead to her door. The area under the top floor looks like an absolute desolate pigsty. Which, Chloe assumes, is kind of the point.

Amongst all the debris and ruin and trash, no one would think to try and look for anything worthwhile; most people wouldn’t have the time, the will or the means to get through that colossus of a door or wade through the goliath heap of debris somewhere on the bottom floor.

Chloe has also tried to figure out how Max managed to find a place like this but she comes up dry with any logical reason.  

She maneuvers, for lack of a better explanation, the obstacle course of _shit_ and takes a step outside of the sliding window over the kitchen sink. The kitchen sink window Max used as an entrance was overgrown, hidden by a bush and another pile of debris, which was actually really, really smart, Chloe thinks.

_No one can get in if no one knows how. That’s smart, Max._

She puts back everything as it was before and hopes she did it right.

Precisely how cold is punctuated to Chloe when she takes a breath, every last bit of it trailing in the sharp winter air. Through her exhale, she sees the orange tint overtake the cloudy sky, slowly, like melting snow. She dusts her hands against the chilling winter air.

The chill is pleasant and the crunch of snow underfoot is very welcome and borderline nostalgic. Chloe takes a moment to stop and take a deep breath. Once her minute is up, she wanders further to the edge of the sidewalk, looking up and down the street, trying to choose a direction to wander in and maybe scratch something up.

Provided Arcadia Bay wasn’t completely ransacked. Maybe Chloe would get lucky.

Hah, that’s a good one.

What with Max’s shelter being in a house on a slight incline, Chloe decides to go upwards, counting on the fact that, in the return, she’ll have and need less energy to get back, especially if she _does_ get just a _little_ lucky and finds a wild something.

Still improbable. Probably.

Chloe walks, passing houses that have been abandoned for a long time, some less so. Across a few houses, she sees the aftermath of fires; something or someone lighting a flame inside the house, it burning out after time and leaving it's own black trail reminiscent of death and decay.

After a short walk, she notices how eager to set the sun precisely is: what before was a light hue to falling snow has now become dimmer and less ever-present. Either it's set faster or the clouds got to it before the horizon did. Anyways, nightfall spelled bad things for the two of them.

Chloe passes a street, ending in a cul-de-sac and notes it down mentally. She walks by what was probably the streets waste disposal; a line of dumpsters, some _burned_ – Jesus, people are pyromaniacs– some flat-out rotten in their stink despite being covered in a thick layer of snow.

She assumes she’d have to be the very definition of desperate to go for those.

Taking the time to inspect the ground, as well as the buildings, has proven to be helpful most of the time. Chloe has managed to find a stash once due to it being recently perturbed: a fresh trail of steps leading directly to it was what gave it away.

Running a mental checklist, Chloe realizes she isn’t precisely sure what she’s out here to find. Sure, she had time to kill, but this was probably not a very safe way to do it, all things considered. And if she truly needed something, it escaped her.

So for now, Chloe just calls it sight-seeing. She does want one thing, and that’s to see in what ways the Bay has changed without her.

Her guess is not at all; the Bay is a relic, a history textbook come alive. Chloe is sure Arcadia Bay hasn’t changed since the times her mom was her age.

Chloe huffs, shaking away the thought and settling the pang of hurt in her chest.

Her attention, albeit very spotty, is keen enough to notice the houses thinning out, slowly, giving way to brush and trees. So far, things have been relatively silent and Chloe feels as though it's probably smart to turn back. She spots a motel a little ways away from her and, with some hesitation– though not much– she makes her way towards the motel.

As is the deal with most things, she arrives in the parking lot with low expectations and looks around, giving herself an idea of what she’s working with.

The sign was there to meet her when she walked into the lot: a tall sign reaching for the sky on white– or what used to be white– concrete beams with cracks sprawling, the head of the sign housing lights that no longer work, with bulbs that sit there, cracked.

In neon tubes at its top, it wrote out “Twin Peaks Breakfast Inn” The tubing was relatively easy to make out, despite the surplus of snow covering it.

The building itself was two floors high. From where Chloe stood, she could get a relative layout of the motel, but also spot the small horde of… let's say, monsters, for now, Chloe had no idea what the fuck to call ‘em, pounding on a door to a room, on the second floor.

The railing directly in front of the door had been smashed through, apparently and on the floor directly under, there’s a body of another one of those things with something through its head.

Whatever was used to stab the monster is thin and very hard to make out at this distance. The distinct lack of footprints also perturbed her for a reason she couldn’t exactly place. For all she knew, these might have been motel residents.

Chloe moves from her spot by the side of the road and walks carefully through the brush and behind the motel building. She stops at the closest window to her to look through and is faced with a bathroom. Trying the window is no use, since it's, of course, locked or perhaps frozen shut, but Chloe notes that the room seems untouched so she’s going to try and go in at a later date.

The rest of the ground floor rooms either prove to be a ransacked bust or an attempt at reinforcing and holding down, that would make too much noise if you try and enter. Most were just filled with useless shit and boarded up, locked up, away from the world.

Chloe manages to find the stairs that lead to the second floor on the outside. Now, she realizes, getting to the small horde is a done deal. Another thing is to distract them because getting through them would take far too much energy, would be too risky and not to mention how long it would take her to do it carefully.

Going under the stairs, she looks into the motel’s parking lot from another angle and spots a few things she hadn’t seen before: a car, first and foremost, that doesn’t seem to be absolutely fucked under all the snow, the body that fell from the second floor, but now Chloe is much closer to it, and she notices how the other exit, the one on the other side of the one she used to enter, is blocked off by two dumpsters, though ineffectively.

Chloe slowly creeps through the snow, inspecting the mutated corpse and noticing that the weapon used to kill it is a long screwdriver. Keeping her eyes peeled around her, she slowly yanks the screwdriver from its place in its skull and it pops out with a wet sound. Chloe inspects the bloodied tip and it seemed to still be good, wear wise. It's tip still seems to be sharp, and bits of it seem sanded. Wiping it in the snow, Chloe turns and makes her way back down under the stairs again.

From there, she creeps up the steps, knowing full well the overrun door is to her left. At the top of the stairs, Chloe peeks, slowly, anxious, wanting not to disturb any of the fuckers.

Much to her luck, all of them are still pounding away mindlessly at the boarded up door and window. From where Chloe is, she can count around six of them, give or take. The first thing that comes to mind, because she sure as hell can’t fight them all, is a distraction.

_How the fuck am I gonna find a distraction?_

Chloe, for lack of a better description, _slides_ down the snow-padded steps gingerly and without much sound, only to move under said stairs, then close to a wall, for a better view of the parking lot.

More of the same old same old, _snow_ and then some more. Under the walkway of the second story for the motel sits a vending machine, basically frozen over. In the parking lot, the same snowed in car from before, which Chloe makes a mental note to inspect later. Dumpsters, still lined up for reinforcement. The other hall with stairs that lead to the second story walkway.

Blowing some air from her nose, Chloe decides to walk to the vending machine, in hopes it a) still has something, b) has a glass component, useful in smashing and noise-making.

The way to it seems much more unbearably long than Chloe would have liked to imagine, thus she keeps her eyes on the road in front of the motel and also around her. She gets to it, finally, and upon further inspection, notices the machine _does_ have some contents still left inside. Though, most are perishable and probably not safe for consumption.

Sighing, Chloe presses the gloved fingers of one hand against the glass. She pushes lightly, hoping to test how much force she might need to crack this open and maybe cause a stir. She scratches at her beanie and thinks.

Her breath, as she thinks idly, fogs up the glass. Looking around, she gets a bright idea. She steps away, but not before making an angry smiley face in the glass, then steps over to reach for a potted plant. Emptying it out, Chloe places a hand on the rim and on the bottom, and swings for the fences.

The pot and the glass collide hard and fast. The glass, shattering, goes everywhere, but due to the clothing requirements imposed by Nature, Chloe is completely unharmed. She tosses the plant in the general direction of where she found it and dislodges a large chunk of glass. She manages to hold it with some solid grip.

Above her, the shambling of feet can be heard and she starts to think that her ruckus achieved just what she wanted. From above, a corpse falls, similarly to the last one, she assumes, only this one is still moving. She moves away towards the stairs from before and looks for any other interested parties descending the stairs.

The mutant rises with difficulty and groans weakly, shambling towards something. Again, with difficulty, it senses or smells Chloe; it does something, a weird wiggle to get its body straight, but all in all, it turns to her, shambling in her direction.

Chloe’s eyes keep switching from it to the stairs, as she adjusts the glass shard in her hands, holding the sharper tip of the two downwards. With a swift kick, her booted foot arrives with haste into the chest of the decrepit mess and it topples over again. Walking around it, as to stay out of it's reach, Chloe puts the same foot down to it's throat and stabs. The shard goes clean through the skull and the flailing stops.

Leaving the shard there, Chloe backs up, again towards the stairs and behind them, to stand at the foot of it, waiting for more unsuspecting husks of what used to be humans. Noticing the blood splattered on her forearms and fingers as she reaches for the screwdriver, Chloe comes off the small amount of adrenaline and shock that came with what just happened. The husk's mere existence, she realizes, deeply sickened her for whatever odd reason she can think of. It's the kind of sick that transcended the expulsion of stomach fluids and acid, but rather dug deep. 

Her whole body shuddered with force.

Chloe shakes her head, willing herself back to some sort of peace of mind. She realizes it's fleeting, though, and turns to action instead; she takes careful steps with a screwdriver in hand, close to her core. She creeps up the last few steps and turns the corner, like last time. The number has dwindled somewhat: the one corpse she made a moment ago was out of the count. That same count came up one more short, but she found that one quick, under the feet of all the husks.

Swearing under her breath, Chloe thinks more, with her head hidden out of the way, and a lightbulb all but shows above her head.

The car. The  _car;_ Chloe wonders how she didn't think of this before! 

But the grin that comes with the idea is wiped as soon as it shows; the battery, for all Chloe knows, could either be gone or long, long dead. She sighs and chalks it up to having to hope for the best.

Taking careful steps back down, Chloe half-jogs through tracks already made in the snow and follows the relative safety of the walkway overhead, passing the smashed open vending machine… which, she notes to double check on her way out.

Following the walkway only gets her so far and Chloe soon has to step out into the steadily falling snow, which she only notices now. If this keeps up it might mean a blizzard later in the evening.

While on the thought topic, Chloe looks up, searching for the sun, finding it between clouds and noticing how much lower it is to before. The orange hue of the sky worries Chloe just a little bit and she prays she’d finish here soon. In reality, she could just go home. But, someone’s probably stuck up there, hiding.

There’s also a tint of lack-of-things-to-do and curiosity that’s getting the better of Chloe. She sighs.

Something something, curiosity killed the cat.

_Ah, but satisfaction brought it back!_

Anyways.

Chloe wipes away the snow that’s gathered on the windows of the car and chips at the ice, attempting to see inside. Her hands manage little in ways of ice removal, so she pulls the screwdriver out, hoping it’ll do the business right. With the tip, she chips again, but lightly, at the ice, hoping not to break the window in its frozen over, possibly fragile state.

Managing to chip away at the ice with the screwdriver, Chloe wipes away the shards it leaves behind and takes a peek inside. One side of the car is completely snowed over, so her eyes find it hard to focus what with the low amounts of light the car interior has, but she makes due, anyways. The inside doesn’t seem to be full up with anything, really, but there’s something in the back seat, something Chloe can't quite make out. Yet.

She tries the adjacent window, wanting to look inside and figure out the item. It turns out to be a blanket, or maybe a quilt. Chloe doesn’t know all the specifics but it looks _warm_ and cozy and cuddly, so Chloe wants it, for herself or for Max, doesn’t matter.

For a moment she ponders the morality of this, but when she takes in the state of the car, she scoffs at herself. 

 _When did you become_ human,  _Chloe Price?_

Taking one glance back over to the crowd, she counts them again, _six, still, even with the one killed,_ and judges the approximate distance. Under the assumption that there _is_ a car alarm, it _can_ and _will_ catch their attention. Or maybe it won't. Then, Chloe's shit out of luck. 

She huffs and moves around back to the trunk. She clears the foot of snow off it with a sweep of the arm and is faced with a frozen over back end. She rolls her eyes. In the case that a hasty escape is needed, Chloe starts checking for any path or way to duck out in case things somehow go awry. Chloe, while moving back to the door where the blanket is, makes a mental note of one route that leads to the back of the motel and to the relative safety that's located directly behind her. The motel is surrounded with dense trees; if things go _seriously_ south, she can make a mad dash and ditch whoever was stuck up there and hopefully escape with her head intact. 

With screwdriver in hand, Chloe positions herself, placing her back against the passenger side window and glances back at the group of monsters, back to the window and then back again to the group.

_One, two, three._

She clutches the screwdriver and holds it so that the butt of the screwdriver is protruding slightly. With a hard swing, she hits it.

Her hand bounces off and she winces in pain.

“Ow, ow, ow,” she mutters under her breath and after shaking the pain off, takes the same stance again, swinging again, harder this time.

The pain shoots through her hand and bounces around inside her forearm. And just like that, Chloe is fucking mad. At herself or at the car, she can't tell. She stows the screwdriver, mutters again, a “Fuck it,” this time, and takes a step back, slamming the heel of her boot into the car window a few times.

Finally, the window gives, and Chloe’s smile spreads under her face mask as the alarm rings off. She yanks the shards of glass out of their place in the window off and tosses them away from there, hoping her coat is thick enough for any of the remaining glass not to go through it. Reaching into the car, Chloe grabs the blanket and it's heavier in her hand than expected. She dashes away. 

Once in safety, she looks towards the group, now shambling towards her and the car. She realizes the amount of sound it makes and makes a quick run back behind the hotel. Stopping halfway between the car and the door in question, she gathers her wits about her while stuffing the blanket into her backpack, careful to not get any of the blanket into the snow and sets out to the door again.

Keeping her eyes peeled still, Chloe finds her way back to the stairs she was at before. From around the corner, she stares at the top, waiting in case any corpse _i_ _ntelligently_ makes its way down the stairs, rather than just fall directly off. A couple of thuds later, Chloe gathers enough courage to make her way up to the walkway and take a look around the corner there.

To her luck, she finds the door clear completely and the moment this information registers, she _moves,_ like a bat out of hell. The door turns out to be further away from her than she thought since it was hard to judge the distance, considering the pile of bodies occupying the space in front of it. Chloe counts them all from above as they struggle to get up and counts four still in a pile, squirming to get up, one half way up and the other is well on it's way across the lot, through the snow, towards the car alarm that is yet to shut off.

She turns her attention to the door, her breaths ragged and pounds away. In between pounds she half-shouts, hoping to get the attention of whoever is behind the door.

“Hey!” she knocks with force behind her knocks, “Open up! The door is clear, I can get you out!” she knocks again and again, “It's safe, I’m friendly!”

 _Fuck,_ she mutters, her pounding without luck. Chloe takes a step back and runs into the door with force. It barely budges so she keeps going and going. Huffing with anger, takes a step back again and goes foot first close to the doorknob and the lock flies out, the door opens and Chloe smiles, managing to get it.

Immediately, she hides to the left of the door, behind the wall and calls out to the unknown in the room.

“I’m friendly! The way out is clear, you’re free to go, just don’t shoot me!”

Nothing.

The silence knocks at her head, and Chloe peeks over the walkway out to the corpses, to find all of them have huddled slowly over to the car.

Taking a deep breath, Chloe pulls the gun off her shoulder and prepares herself.

“I’m coming in, don’t shoot!”

She takes a step out into the door and walks in slowly, her gun aiming low, at waist level with the stock at her shoulder. The motel room stinks, the furniture is thoroughly misplaced from any logical way of arrangement of a room, probably due to all the furniture being used for reinforcement. The door to the bathroom is wide open and the inside is a deep dark, the light from the window barely coming through whatever is draped over the window.

“Are- are you in here?” Chloe asks, weakly, unsure whether whoever is in here is even there… or alive.

With care, she slowly peeks into the bathroom, but is stopped for a moment by the car alarm giving out. Her ears twitch and she pays attention to the outside. She turns back again and walks fully into the bathroom, gun ready.

Pausing, Chloe slumps against the wall behind her, giving out a deep sigh that paints clouds through her face mask, even inside the room.

In front of her on the dirty, bathroom floor is a body of a girl that looks right around her age that looks like she’s been through hell and back. The veins through her forearms are a sickly grey, her skin a pale shade of a color Chloe can’t even place correctly in the world outside, across the same skin are something akin to cysts or growths, or something, painted a sickli _er_ yellow.

Chloe’s gag reflex goes off and she faces away from the bathroom.

Her worries are quelled to a minuscule extent when she notices the splash of blood above her head and the gun placed neatly against her leg, where it slid out of the palm of her hand. Shuddering, Chloe walks back into the bathroom and, while keeping her eyes away from the corpse, reaches for the gun and puts it away.

Considerably shaken after witnessing the crime against humanity that is what happened in that bathroom but thoroughly relieved to not have to have witnessed that before it happened, Chloe sighs deeply and walks around the room, looking for things that might still be of any use to her.

Through the quiet, devoid of the loud car alarm from before, she hears the singsong noise of a blade stabbing its way through a skull and the flick of it through the air. Pocketing a granola bar she found in a backpack, Chloe sneaks over to the door and takes a careful peek outside.

In the lot, in all the snow is a dark figure covered in a coat, with a wide brimmed hat to top it all off.

Chloe hasn’t been careful enough, though, because the figure turns towards her, as she ducks back into the room, praying she didn’t just get seen, considering how stupid that idea would be.

“Come out. I won’t do anything to you,” she hears a voice that is one hundred percent not what she expected. It's a girls voice but the age is hard to tell; it's stern, the accent holds an odd, bourgeois air and something about it strikes Chloe as familiar.

With absolute uneasiness ricocheting through her ribcage, Chloe slides down the wall with her knees up high as she sits down. Sighing, she wonders how she got into this entire mess.

“You’re making things harder for both of us, and there’s no need for that,” the figure continues, _loudly_ , Chloe notes. “I’m looking for someone, maybe you could help me out! I think they’re the ones that started this car alarm!”

Groaning, Chloe gets up, her back still to the wall and with her face close to the edge of the door, she calls out. “Lower your fucking voice! Mutants half a click up the street in either direction can hear your dumb ass. At this rate, you'll attract more than the car alarm.”

There's a pause and a throat clear. Chloe steps out into the brittle air after another pause and faces the figure, her face still obscured by a mask. The girl in the lot, she takes in, is wearing a long coat, something akin to a sheriff's hat, with a scarf wrapped around her face tightly. There’s a slick knife in her hand and a harness around her waist, no doubt holding a firearm out of Chloe's sight. 

“Not much in a position to talk, what with that alarm going off. Who knows what could have come along. Was it you who set it off?” she asks and points the vague direction of the car. Between the car and the girl, corpses are littered and dotted in different distances from each other, all of them dead in the snow.

“Yeah. I tripped the alarm to get all those,” Chloe gestures at the dead bodies, “away from _this_ door,” she supplies, pointing downwards at her feet as she passes through the doorway and out onto the walkway, where she leans on to relatively stable rails.

 The girl looks behind her, at the car and back. "There are smarter ways to do that, you know. You could h-" 

“Look, if you want my help finding the person you’re looking for, I’d suggest you start behind me,” she gestures with her head towards the door, "instead of the two of us sitting in the middle of nowhere and talking." Chloe silently wishes she could get all of this the fuck over with already. She has a new image in her face to keep her awake at night, now. 

The girl below her takes a pause before muttering a low “Alright, I'll come up there,” and taking careful steps through the thick snow towards the same steps Chloe had dutifully used before, but not before checking the street behind her.

From her spot above, Chloe is ahead of her in that regard– her eyes have been stuck more to the road than on the girl under her or anywhere under her– only because the girl’s comment from before, about the alarm attracting who knows what, gave Chloe something to chew on.

Once her footfalls come closer, Chloe straightens out and faces the girl; they both stop in their tracks as one approaches the other and after a short pause of staring, the unknown girl extends her hand towards Chloe.

“Victoria.”   
  
_Eugh, her name is as posh as her voice,_ Chloe thinks, but she connects their hands anyways.

“Chloe.”

When their hands are free, they both go to take a step, Victoria heading into the room as she lowers her scarf, and Chloe taking to the other side of the door, to lean on the railing in front of her more.

She can hear Victoria gasp, then hears her gag reflex trigger once, twice. Sniffles are followed by an “Ah, fuck,” which is followed by a pause.

“I thought I was saving someone,” Chloe starts, “when I got the crowd off this door, but–,” Chloe turns.

 

And stares down the action of a revolver.  

Her hands raise in defense, slowly, as she swallows hard and backs up as much as she can against the railing without it giving way and failing her structurally.

“Lets not do anything rash here, okay?” Chloe says, both to the barrel and the person behind the trigger. Much to Chloe’s luck, Victoria’s finger is not on the trigger, as she practices proper gun safety. Despite the gun safety, though, the hole the gun will leave in her forehead still feels very real where it's staring. It etches the lines of a circle into her forehead and she can hear the nerves tingling.

“Did you do this?! Did you shoot her?” Victoria asks, with a lining of rage, worry in her voice and a shake to the hand holding her gun.

“No,” Chloe deadpans, “I didn’t. I found her that way. She killed herself before turning, I think.”

One hand lowers slowly to reach for the gun Chloe found, but Victoria jerks her own at Chloe’s forehead and Chloe swallows, regretting her recent actions.  

“Hey, whoa, calm down. I’m only going to reach for the gun I found at the body. I’m not even sure it's loaded at all,” Chloe says, still unsure what to do with the hand that went to reach for the gun she spoke of.

Victoria stares at her for a beat, perhaps mulling over whether the fact to trust Chloe was smart. The answer to that debate in her head must have been a ‘Yes,’ as she lowered her revolver only _slightly_ , giving Chloe an unspoken kind of permission.

As to not repeat last mistakes, Chloe’s movement is slow and deliberate as she reaches for her backpack. With ease and efficiency, she wiggles out the pistol from the ‘crime scene’, out of the pocket in her backpack and puts it within view of Victoria. Chloe holds it by the slide, her hands as away from the trigger as they can get; from there, she adjusts it so the grip is pointed at Victoria and holds it out to her.

Grabbing it, Victoria takes a step back, inspecting the weapon.

“This- this is hers, you’re right,” Victoria stutters after another pause of inspecting, “But how do I know _you’re_ not the one who killed her?!”

Chloe sighs, tired of these antics, wishing she could be bored in Max’s little shelter. “Probably on the count of the fact that stabbing one of _those_ things caused me distress; I almost threw up once stabbing one of the corpses you killed earlier and almost twice so when I saw your friend’s final resting place and what almost took her. I hate all of this shit. 

“It sucks, okay? Death fucking _sucks._ I’ve had too much of it,” Chloe deadpans, “So either I didn’t kill your friend out of cold blood, or I put her out of her misery on her own behest. I did neither, and only found her that way.”

Victoria hasn’t moved an inch, though her face seems to be softening from the hard gaze she had on before, as Chloe continues, “Those are the facts, and take them whatever way you want to.”

There’s an uneasy pause between the both of them, during which Chloe notes that her arms fucking _hurt_ from all this _shit_. First, all the effort to get very little, now this? She’s tired and just wants to go home. To Max.

Eventually, though, Victoria exhales, her revolver slowly going down.

“You’re right. It was just hard to believe my friend’s dead,” Victoria continues, rubbing at her forehead as she takes steps back into the room, willing to give Chloe space after what happened. She sits on the bed, her head in her hands.

Releasing the breath she didn’t realize she was holding, Chloe silently thanks whatever-the-fuck-is-up-above as she sighs deeply, again as she walks out onto the walkway, _seriously_ wishing she had a pack on her right now. But alas, cruel are the fate-weavers in this godforsaken snow hole.

Chloe still pats herself down, despite knowing there’s nothing there. Between the pats, she hears Victoria get up from the bed, followed by a sniffle.

“Sorry,” Victoria apologizes, “Finding my friend here, like this, kind of… caught me off guard and I… acted out. I’m sorry for pulling a gun on you.” The eye contact shined a flash of vulnerability before being cut off by the rim of her hat dipping down.

Her voice, Chloe notes, at this point sounds much softer than before. This new girl that seemed like very professional, cold as a monolith, like a chaotic do-gooder, which today are a rare breed. Now she just seems much, much more human. Which is weird. Chloe can’t explain the first impressions she gained of this person before, but they don’t matter much now.

Her facial protection is hard to see through, so Chloe rolls her eyes with a small smirk, “S’fine, I get it. It's water under the bridge now,” her hands untangle in front of her chest, “No point in keeping grudges about petty shit, you acted like a human.”

Victoria runs a finger under her nose and sighs. “You’re right,” Victoria continues, putting her revolver away, "She was actually the one I wanted to come here to find. We had a little shelter here before moving." 

 Chloe mhm's. "Looks like you're out of a job," she shrugs, rather coldly and Victoria is stunned a little. She quickly clears her throat, a frown drawing on her face that shoots daggers into Chloe. 

“Say, are you from the Bay? That’s the closest town to here and I don’t think you came all this way from the next one over,” Victoria asks.

Nodding, Chloe replies, “Yeah, I just recently came back. I was born and raised in the Bay before the shit hit the fan.”

“How long have you been back?”

Chloe shrugs, “For maybe two days, tops. A little under. Not sure anymore myself.”

“Are you with someone?” _Oh, here it comes_ _, she asks me this so she can rob me_ _,_ “We’ve got a little group of survivors huddled in the school.”

Chloe stops, so they both stop. The two of them were previously walking down the stairs and away from the motel, back to the Bay, slowly. That had been the unanimous plan they constructed without saying anything, what with them both being tired as hell (Victoria at least looks the part).

She blinks a few times. _What?_

“What?”

Looking at her with a perplexed expression, Victoria repeats, “Group, survivors. School. Arcadia Bay.”

 _Then why hasn’t_ …

“We have to go back,” Chloe says, knocking herself out of a stupor and starts in a rush, wading through the snow that’s slowly built over her past tracks.

“I assume you mean back to Arcadia, but why?”

 

“I’ll tell you later, let’s just go.”


	6. CHAPTER FIVE: MIRRORED BY OUR GRIEVING PLEA

Chloe haphazardly trudges through the snow, leaving sloppy tracks, her mind set on making her way back, shaking Max away and tearing an answer from her if it's the last thing she does. 

 

Something in her seethes, something ugly and twisting that she can’t quite place. It's not anger, it feels a lot like sadness and it's perhaps closer to grief, because Chloe remembers her first thoughts upon seeing Max, not so long ago. 

The sadness in her eyes was obvious and she just wasn’t her usual self, the same one that Chloe remembered from all that time ago, how the light in her eyes was no longer the same and the lilt to her voice when she spoke wasn’t there anymore. 

She remembers these things about Max because after everything that has happened and after the complete collapse of society, memories are all you have left, and sometimes it's hard fitting the person into their old cast. 

Chloe wants to know why Max chose to do this to herself. 

Her rampant trudging has left Chloe zoned and completely out of the loop, so much so that she couldn’t hear Victoria calling to her until her hand was gripping Chloe’s shoulder like a vice, stopping her in place. 

“Chloe, what the hell has gotten into you?” Victoria asks, worry in her furrowed brows, “Why did you suddenly bolt like that? I understand trying to get home quick but this is ridiculous.” 

Regarding her for a second, Chloe thinks of an answer. She turns forward again and starts walking at a more normal pace, sighing before giving her reasoning. 

“Because… My friend is out cold, back home in the Bay. I hadn’t known there were other survivors and I don’t think she knew either,” she says, facing away from Victoria. Chloe’s head is tilted up slightly to inspect the sky in case of more snow, or another flash blizzard, like the one that receded in the time it took her to get ready and go out. 

“If she’s out as cold as you say, there’s not much use running back home, especially not right now,” Victoria reasons in a stern voice, “The sun is slowly setting and you’ll only exhaust yourself by the time we get to the Bay. You’re not going any faster than I am with twice the exertion and if we're caught in the night, how will you defend yourself?” 

Victoria is right, Chloe realizes. She doesn’t want to admit it to herself but it all makes sense; Chloe slows her pace and lets Victoria catch up. The two walk side by side in silence for a little while, following the straight, snow-covered road back to town. 

“So…” Victoria starts, “Why were you in such a rush? If your friend is out cold, that is.” 

Without saying anything, Chloe’s brows furrow under her mask. She doesn’t want to reveal more than she has to because she’s not one hundred percent sure Victoria can be trusted, so Chloe has no answer for a few moments. They keep walking. 

“I-It’s just that… my friend has been living on her own for… a very long time, I think. And I what I thought was that there was no one left in Arcadia Bay besides her. I wanted to get her to  _ proper _ safety, somewhere with passable medical capabilities. She might be seriously injured, considering how long she’s been knocked out.”

Victoria turns to the road ahead without saying much, understanding the situation, but choosing to give it thought. Her breath seeps through her impromptu face mask and what manages the way out is outlined in the harsh winter air. Her eyes flicker from in front of her feet to the road ahead, occasionally checking at the sides as they move down the road. Chloe’s routine of keeping a check on their surroundings is very similar to hers. 

As Victoria goes to say something to Chloe about she had said before, after conjuring up a proper response, Chloe’s hand shoots up to silence her when Chloe’s ears perk up fast and almost violently so. 

Behind them and off the road, something rustles the evergreen branches of a tree. It sounds unnatural against the backdrop of silence and breathing, and odd due to how small the source sounds. The rustling only paved the way to something akin to a low hum, a moan. The humming, the more Chloe concentrates on it, sounds very familiar. To the entire situation, there’s a certain wrongness as the air fills with a tension neither of them expects. 

Chloe’s skin crawls and Victoria is unnerved to no end. 

 

Shifting uncomfortably next to her, Victoria starts looking around in a similar fashion to Chloe, her weapon readied at her side. They stand back to back in this pseudo-silence for a few moments, unsure of what to do and how to proceed. 

Suddenly, Chloe’s intuition points her away from where she was staring.

She hears a voice, carrying her name. 

“ Chloe .”

Her eyes widen and her back straightens out. Something isn’t right. Her eyes look around in confusion, not quite able to place why the sound of that voice badgers at her brain, unable to tear her attention away. 

_ “Chloe…” _

With her eyes still darting around, uncertain what to do, it suddenly clicks, and her eyes go wide, her legs are freed and her body leans forward ever so slightly. The voice sounds sickeningly familiar. 

_ Max.  _

Chloe repeats her name under her breath and starts to move towards the tree line on their side of the road. She stops, similarly like last time, only this time around, she fights the hand at her shoulder, managing to leave its grasp, only to fail the second time. 

“Chloe, no!” Victoria’s hands are around Chloe, gripping her in place, “Don’t you fucking think about it.” 

“I- I have to,” Chloe blunders, a driving force pushing her forwards, “That was Max, I ha- I have to go--”    


“I don’t know who Max is,” Victoria assures, cutting into the end of Chloe’s sentence, with labor in her voice, “but that sure as shit isn’t her. Chloe, snap out of it!” 

Their entire conversation is held in a stage-whisper sort of tone. The sky is dim, as is the snow around them and the world has taken on a blueish hue. The sun is almost gone and the night is sure to catch them out if they keep at it like this. 

“What are you doing?” asks Victoria again, unable to keep Chloe in place for long. Victoria finally gives up after a moment or two of struggle and decides to approach this another way: she grabs Chloe by her arms and throws her to the side, ass-first into the snow. From there, she takes a step to her and slaps her with the back of her hand across the face, careful not to hit her goggles, knowing they’d leave a mark. 

And, oddly enough, Chloe snaps out of it. She’s dazed, the lower part of her face hurts, her ass is cold and why is she in the snow?

“Victoria, what the fuck?” she asks from the ground. 

Victoria shushes her as she crouches down to Chloe, “You went crazy for a second then. You heard something from somewhere by the road, down there, told me to shut up, then almost wandered off the path and into the woods. Since you heard something, there’s been a weird hum in the air.” 

With her hand to her forehead, Chloe laments the oncoming headache, only to stop moments later to attempt to focus. Down the road, behind Victoria, she spots a figure and freezes completely. She raises her hand to tell Victoria something’s amiss, as she keeps her eyes on the newly arrived. 

Her eyes manage to concentrate after a while of trying to get her eyes to work and she looks at the figure. Her eyes narrow when it becomes obvious to her that it's not human, whatever it is. 

The…  _ thing _ she spots shambles into the road and towards them very, very slowly. Its body is grotesque and sickening: a grey-skinned, yellow-spot-covered emaciated body of what looked to be a short girl long ago, with long, matted black hair, her lower jaw missing, its freakishly long tongue protruding straight from her throat and into the cold, winter air. Her hands are twisted at an odd angle and one of its forearms is broken and no outline of breath could be seen. 

“Don’t– Victoria, whatever you do, don’t. Turn. Around,” Chloe eeks out, quietly, and Victoria’s face is quickly painted over in confusion and fear. Chloe herself had oodles to fear in this situation; without a proper plan, who knows what this thing can do if it's anything like the sickening tentacled thing she saw earlier. 

“What do we do, then? Sit here?” Victoria asks, still stage-whispering. 

And Chloe doesn’t really have an answer to that, so she goes by logic, “Move– okay, move very,  _ very  _ slowly. Back up the road. I’ll try and get up, then we’ll try things from there.” 

Chloe can see Victoria swallow from under her and, after nodding, Victoria steps slowly, going over Chloe, and behind her. In a similar fashion, Chloe also moves very, very slowly, eager to get out of the snow and onto her feet. 

She doesn’t get a chance to though because the ear-piercing screech the emaciated body lets out almost knocks her back to her feet. Victoria and Chloe both groan in pain, Victoria doubling over and taking a knee, while Chloe almost falls again, but manages to regain her balance. 

Crows fly from almost every tree in the vicinity and Chloe can’t help but wonder how much attention that will attract, clutching the side of her head as her vision doubles. Victoria helps her up a moment later as she’s clutching to one ear and very obviously in a daze, similar to Chloe.

The source of the scream is now standing unnaturally still, almost like there’s no existence occupying it as if it wasn’t moving just a moment ago. Chloe is also sure the humming stopped. Now, whether that’s due to the fact that she can’t hear it over the ringing of her ears or if it's actually gone is a question for later. 

Victoria and Chloe stare down the rigid figure in disbelief and fear. The resolve to stand and fight is there but how to approach the situation isn’t. They don’t have long though, because Chloe’s ear twitches and something tackles her from her right before she has the time to turn in that direction. 

Her gun flies from her hands and into the snow above her head. On top of her, she finds, is a wolf. In a flurry of movement, she feels it's hot breath on her face as it starts to growl and attempt to bite at her. It misses her neck narrowly as Chloe sticks her forearm into its jaws, wanting to whack it's head away. It bites down and Chloe attempts to hold her arm in place as she grasps at the screwdriver in one of her inner pockets. 

The wolf tugs at her forearm to the side and due to this, Chloe almost loses grip on the screwdriver. She leaves it in place and delivers panicked punches to the side of the wolf’s head. One of the punches land right in its eye, without much aiming on Chloe’s part, and she utilizes its stunned state to reach for the screwdriver proper. 

And she does, right in time to hear the sound of a gun go off close to her. In the corner of her eye, Chloe can see Victoria, breathing heavily and the barrel of her gun smoking. With that, Chloe grits her teeth and decides to end this. She uses the hilt of the screwdriver to aim and hit the wolf in the eye, on purpose this time, and stuns it again. 

The wolf almost lets go of her arm, but Chloe is in no such luck. So, she drives the tip of the screwdriver through the underside of the wolf’s throat. The grip of its jaw loosens in a second and the wolf goes limp. Chloe quickly stands up, throwing the wolf off of her. 

Her breathing is heavy and ragged, the headache is still there as is the ringing in her ears and adrenaline is holding the pain of her forearm away, for the time being, keeping her aware and ready. She gives Victoria a nod after she hears her say something along the lines of ‘are you okay?’ 

That’s what Chloe thinks she said, anyways. The pair turns their backs to each other soon enough though, after two more wolves circle them. 

With these, they’re able to take a closer look: their fur, much like the girl from before, is matted, unclean and dusty beyond belief, almost as if the wolves had been pulled from storage. Their eyes are an unnatural color and the wolf facing Chloe looks to be blind in one eye, with matted fur and a torn ear. 

To see such amazing animals reduced simple crumbling ruins of their great existence almost brings a tear to Chloe’s eye. Though, she’s all out for the time being and compassion is hard to come across these days; everything she feels right now is her will to live seeping from every pore in her body and a rage to fight so hot that it's almost blinding. Chloe didn’t plan on dying here, not when Max needed her. 

As she takes steps, something clinks against her boot. Must be her gun, Chloe reckons. Her eyes flash towards the item and back up at the wolf quickly, to assure herself that her assumption was correct. As the wolves circle the two, the pair follows. 

Chloe risks picking up her gun and in that one moment, all hell breaks loose. 

The wolf aimed at her leaps, seemingly trained at her throat. Chloe dodges the wolf, careful not to get Victoria in a tight situation. Luckily for her, Victoria has already distanced herself enough not to get hit by the tackling form of the wolf Chloe just got out of the way from. They each have enough space to continue their fights without getting in the others’ way.  

As Chloe regains her hearing fully, she half wishes she didn’t. At least, not yet. The snarling of the wolves she hadn’t heard until now is hollow, harrowing and terrifying all at the same time, but still just as vicious as a wolf that is alive could sound. It still barely sounds right and leaves goosebumps across Chloe’s skin. 

Fatigue catches up with her as the adrenaline peak is slowly wearing off, and her breathing becomes deeper, but her heart rate still quickens. The wolf charges at Chloe again, but this time, it makes an attempt at snatching her leg. Quick to bat it away, Chloe moves to the side and kicks, which slows the wolf’s attempt and, in retaliation, she swings the butt of the screwdriver at the wolf’s head. 

It connects but does little past angering the wolf. It rears its teeth after it's done shaking its head. 

The wolf decides to go for the arm, attempting to get Chloe down to the ground to reach her neck, but to no avail. Chloe, in a fading rush of adrenaline, punches the wolf square in the side of the head with the hand that’s still gripping the screwdriver. It yelps and stumbles to the ground, and Chloe, in a spot of genius, decides to swing a kick into its abdomen. 

Her boot lands lower than expected and Chloe winces for a split second. She drops to her knees and stabs the blunt screwdriver head through the wolf’s neck by bringing her arms high above her head and swinging downwards. The wolf, to Chloe’s dismay, manages to wriggle out of her reach, with the screwdriver still lodged into its neck. 

The wolf’s proud walk has now deteriorated from the wounds and it's struggling to keep its balance. It snarls, only this time it's a lot weaker than before. Before it has a chance to attempt a last-ditch effort or retreat, a bullet flies through the wolf’s ribcage, and the animal slumps over with a low whine and… gargle? Chloe shudders as her shoulders slump, and she relaxes. 

Next to her, she sees a disheveled Victoria, clearly out of breath and without her hat. Her hand is still holding her weapon trained at the wolf, probably half expecting it to wake up and attack again. Chloe’s eyesight blurs as she takes a step to retrieve her screwdriver. She shakes her head and wills it away. When she turns, she sees Victoria dusting the snow on her hat off, turned towards where the figure was before. 

“What… what the  _ fuck _ was any of that?” Victoria asks, still catching her breath. 

Chloe can’t breathe, so she tears down her face mask and lifts the goggles, crouching down to breathe properly. She plops down to her knees after a moment and stares up, swallowing. 

“I… I don’t know. No idea. Can–,” Chloe coughs, out of trauma to her chest, she assumes, “Can we just get out of here? I really want to sleep.” 

Victoria eyes her up and down, concern gathering in her pupils, “Not with that arm you’re not.” 

Confusion paints Chloe’s face and she looks at her right, then left forearm. The right is all clear whereas the left? The left forearm has, uh… seen better days. Her coat is ripped up where the wolves teeth bit in from the scuffle from before. When Chloe flexes her hands, the forearm muscles tense and pull in a strange way; she can’t tell if it's exertion or injury. 

She waves it away with her good hand, “I’ll be fine,” Chloe supplies, standing up, dusting the snow from her knees. Her vision goes blurry again like she’s stood up too fast.  

Victoria just hums in affirmation and, after giving Chloe a look for a moment, turns to the road ahead of them. There’s a tension in Chloe’s chest after Victoria starts to make her way down and, after enough of a distance is made between them, Chloe closes it without a single word.

 

Chloe forgets to ask Victoria how she was after that fight.

 

*** * ***

 

Time passes. 

 

Victoria and Chloe both spend a long while in complete silence, with only the crunch of snow in their steps and the darkening sky above them. Chloe feels an unease line her stomach the closer they inch towards the Bay. She’s worried about Max, about her current state  _ and _ about what happened to her in the past. 

She’s also worried about Victoria, and the silence between them. 

That reminds Chloe, they’d have to have that talk at one point. She sighs. 

“Oh, by the way, Victoria,” Chloe starts quietly, but her words are cut off by a yawn. She shuts the yawn down and shakes her head while, humming inquiringly, Victoria turns slightly, to listen to what Chloe had to say. 

“Sorry, for, uh, getting you into,” Chloe continues, gesturing with her head over her shoulder, “all of…  _ that _ .” 

Victoria only shrugs and turns forward again, “Don’t be.”

“I would have probably fought that alone if you hadn’t been there,” she appends after a beat of silence, “Either that or someone would find a body mangled in the middle of that street. It would have been mine. Or yours.” 

Scoffing, Chloe voices her thoughts, “Or both.”

Chloe rubs at her neck as the two fall into another silence. She wouldn’t really call it comfortable but… it's  _ a  _ silence. They spend a long while walking after that and Chloe’s uneasiness has only increased since the last time she gave it any attention. Her head’s been lost the last few miles, stuck thinking about this, about that, but most of all about Max. 

They pass the cul-de-sac Chloe had noted long ago and she realizes the two are far closer than she had thought at first, so she shakes herself out of her daydreams. 

The pair leave their prints in the snow covering the streets of the Bay with purpose as more and more of the town comes in; her arm feels no different, her head sways no less and all Chloe really,  _ really  _ fucking wants is some sleep. The night’s almost over them completely, and in that, she finds it funny how slowly the time seems to move. 

From the trees and from high up, the two can hear birds in their tow, the ravens sounding off the loudest, which brings all sorts of superstitious thoughts to the forefront of Chloe’s mind before she dismisses them all as useless folktales and age old bullshit. But what if it isn’t? 

Further down the street, the light of the moon casts odd shadows onto the snow in front of them. Something about them lines Chloe’s face with worry. Victoria has a similar opinion, evident by her stopping in her tracks and lowering herself, preparing in case of danger down the street from them. 

Chloe swallows, her mind whirring with all kinds of monstrosities she’d imagine would be eager to pop out and have a chance at their lives and cadavers, once they’re done with the first part. Though, they stand in silence for a beat, before something metallic behind them sounds off loudly. 

Victoria drags Chloe forcefully, from out of the street and behind the back of a van, covered in snow and untouched for ages. Bringing a finger to shush Chloe up is pointless, but Victoria does it anyway. The bewildered look in Chloe’s eyes tells her all she needs and the two wait in something akin to silence. 

They hear a sigh and a groan, followed by a rattling of what sounds like keys on a keychain and a set of feet stomping across the fresh layer of snow on the sidewalk. 

“Jesus, I hate these night patrols,” starts a rough, sleep-riddled voice. The words are followed by a tut and a yawn from another voice. 

“Tell me about it,” joins in the other, much younger voice. That voice sighs and takes steps in the evening snow. “Let’s just… get going. Get it over with.” 

Victoria and Chloe hear a click, to which a beam of light appears. It does its rounds on the buildings around them, finally settling on the evening snow as one of the two voices hums something soft and slow. The flashlight traces to and fro, going through even the windows on the van, but eventually settles on something in the snow. 

Their tracks. 

The light stays there and the two can hear something happening between the two voices that just appeared. This goes on for another few moments, the two voices debating shortly in whispers, figuring out what to do. They choose to move towards where the tracks stop. 

Chloe’s heart sinks as she feels the weight of the silence on her shoulders. The tracks they left are painfully obvious. Victoria inspects Chloe’s expression and mirrors it well, obviously getting what Chloe’s thinking. 

But, like a saving grace, in the distance, the two hear gunfire. Their scuffle is brought to an abrupt end as two shots followed closely by a third ring out over the Bay, and the crunch of snow stops. 

“Dude, let’s go,” the younger voice whispers, “Fuck those tracks, let's see what that was. Come on. We can’t risk it.”  

It feels like an eternity of listening to distancing footfalls before Chloe releases the breath she was holding. In all that time she hadn’t noticed Victoria’s closeness. She wouldn’t call it unpleasant, to be honest, but Victoria was not really her type. Anyways, Victoria moves back when she notices the proximity and helps Chloe up. 

“Let’s hurry and get out of this godforsaken cold,” she stage-whispers, yanking Victoria up by the forearm and Victoria agrees with her in stride. This time, they stick to odd routes, rather than the sidewalk, mixing and matching between road and sidewalk, mostly due to the amount of snow, following where it's passably piled.  

More time passes the further they go into Arcadia Bay and Chloe can barely feel her legs. 

Whether it's exertion or stray snow in her boots from all the scuffles, she has no idea what the cause of that is, but they ache when her toes move with every step and she’s not quite sure what to do with herself anymore. She just floated through the last mile, Victoria no doubt (probably) paying enough attention for the both of them. 

As they get closer to Max’s shelter, Chloe remembers that Max had wanted her shelter or home to stay hidden. It looks like Max had made sure of that, going through all that length just to keep it hidden away from any eyes. They pass down the street where Max’s hideout is and Chloe keeps going, down until the next intersection, to make sure Victoria had no idea where it was. 

Once they reach a good enough distance away, Chloe pipes up to grab Victoria’s attention. “Victoria, wait,” she starts with a tired voice and something in her throat. Victoria turns, the same tiredness from Chloe’s voice visible in Victoria’s eyes. 

“I-I can’t follow you to wherever it was you said your group had a camp set up. We can meet here at the crack of dawn if you want to, but right now, I…” 

Victoria waves it away, “It's fine, go check on your friend. I’ll meet you,” Victoria looks around the barren expanse of the intersection, “here, around here, whatever. I’m tired too.” 

Nodding, Chloe checks the wristwatch she has once she slides off her gloves and deposits them in her jacket pockets. The watch is a little worse for wear even compared to usual and tells her that the timing of the sunset is still the same as any other winter. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll… go do that,” Chloe says, “See you,” and waves, turning to leave.

 

Victoria waves as well but without looking back and her back turned. 

 

*** * ***

 

The world is eerily quiet. 

 

Nothing but the sound of the breeze accompanies Chloe as she warily clambers into the window on the side of the house Max has her hideout in. From inside, she adjusts the bush back, slides the window shut carefully, and hops off the sink into the ruined house, the thud of her boots meeting the floor ringing through the abandoned home. 

Chloe hisses when a wave of pain goes up her legs when she lands onto the old ceramic tiles underfoot, “Ow.” 

Despite being here before, Chloe still has issues with finding the stairs. You’d think finding  _ stairs in a house _ would be easy but… somehow Max has proven her wrong. 

At the thought of Max, something in Chloe’s throat hitches. 

While climbing up the stairs, a slew of situations flies across Chloe’s mind, the dullest one but also the most dangerous one would be that Max is still sound asleep in her bed. Something forms in Chloe’s chest with each uneasy exhale and her ascent up the stairs takes a second longer than last time. 

In the darkness of the house, it was hard to see and maneuver. Now, in the confines of this small stairway to the second floor? Nigh impossible to see. Chloe waits for a beat, letting her eyes adjust to the pitch black. When they do, she’s careful with the locks but fiddly with the key, wanting and not at the same time to see what waits for her on the other side. She manages a way in without fumbling the key. 

Guilt flares in her stomach at the thought of leaving Max alone in here if she had woken up. 

Chloe sighs.  _ I guess it's time to find out if I had or not.  _

She etches the door open forward, the rough, jagged bottom edge of the door snagging on the carpet inside slightly as she does. It takes her more force this time, and she has her fatigue to thank for that. She manages to open the door. Chloe takes a step in, choosing not to open it too far and slides it back shut. 

In the silence and darkness, Chloe heard nothing but the blood in her ears. She bothers to only lock one lock for now. 

In the dark, she takes careful steps, feeling her way across the walls, making her way towards the room she placed Max in. On the way there, she spots a faint light in the room from a distance. 

Once she’s inside the room, she sees the candle on the dresser, the one emanating that same faint light she saw a moment ago. 

Her heart quickens. Whatever slams into her chest then takes her completely by surprise. 

She falls onto her back, the wind knocked out of her, dazed and out of breath. Suddenly, there’s a pair of arms wrapped around her neck and someone straddling her chest, pinning her down. She grabs a hold of the forearms trying to take her life and it feels familiar, the freckled skin almost comforting to the touch. 

Her eyes widen and she struggles, slapping at the forearms as she’s being choked, trying to get the assailants attention. 

“Ma- Max,” she gasps out, painfully, “Max, M- Max.” 

Fatigue takes its due and fighting back is harder the longer it all takes. Though, her struggles elicit a response from her attacker after what felt like too long. 

The hands ease their force, almost completely. She faces to the side and coughs roughly, gasping for air, still pinned under the dark figure. When Chloe turns back, she feels something wet splash against her cheeks and hears rugged, erratic breathing. 

With that, the figure of Max gets off Chloe, but crawls backward, mumbling, instead of standing up. After a moment, Chloe discerns it to be her name, followed by something else, over and over. 

Max is mumbling and crying, she realizes. Fear is replaced with a deep pang of sadness as soon as Max starts to crawl back into her room. Part of Chloe is grateful to see that Max is up, but part of her is pained to see her suffering. 

Max stops crawling backward only when she reaches the desk in the room behind her. When she does, her arms wrap around her legs tightly. Max sobs into her knees, shaking. Chloe rubs her throat as she’s leaned onto her elbows. She sits up completely after a moment and stands up to move to Max.

As she walks over, she feels something run down her own cheek. 

She hugs Max protectively and Max flinches when they touch, but eases into Chloe’s hug a moment later. 

 

They both cry. 


End file.
